We are relieved Humboldt school board members decided to keep a five-day school week for the immediate future.
At issue was a proposal to change to a four-day school week.
USD 258 members voted 5-2 to stay with the traditional module Monday night.
Proponents said the primary benefit would be to attract teachers.
Other positive aspects are giving families more time to be together; more time for students to do their homework, sports, and hobbies; and a minimal savings for the district in terms of lower utility bills and less wear and tear on school buses, etc.
A FOUR-DAY school week could be advertised as a perk in terms of attracting teachers and students from other districts. But once the novelty wears off, the downsides to the proposal become more obvious.
The more frequently we are exposed to concepts, the more we learn. Five days a week in a classroom learning a new language, a higher level of math or a new musical instrument beats four days a week, hands down.
Repetition is key to mastering a skill or understanding a concept.
We’d take it one step further in recommending year-round school where breaks are implemented every quarter. Year-round school calendars have the same number of days in the classroom, just spread out differently.
The “summer slide” — the lost knowledge over the course of a summer vacation — is a real concern for educators. Having to dedicate the first several weeks of school each fall to playing “catchup” is valuable time lost.
Student test scores have declined in schools that have switched to a four-day week in both math and English language arts when compared with peers on a five-day schedule, according to studies by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and RAND Corp.
Viewing education as an opportunity, not an undue ordeal from which students and teachers need a break, helps guide which education modules work best.
CHANGING to a four-day school week would also place an undue burden on parents to find child-care for one full day a week. School calendars are challenging enough for working parents to accommodate, with in-service for teachers, seasonal breaks, federal holidays, parent-teacher conferences, and extra-curricular events.
Increasingly, mothers of children ages 5 to 13 are being forced from their jobs at a significant cost to their careers and potential earning power when having to accommodate to the four-day week school schedules, according to a 2019 study by the RAND Corp.
The loss of these women in the workforce also negatively impacts local economies.
