A growing number of school districts are moving to four-day weeks. David Claxton, the executive director of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents and Administrators, says this seems to be happening more in rural parishes, and the biggest motivating factor is money.
“They don’t have a lot of income source. And instead of trying to recruit teachers or employees and to retain some, I think a lot of them move that way financially,” Claxton said.
Claxton says regardless of whether students attend school four days a week or five days a week, the state law requiring 63,720 minutes of instruction time per school year is still in force.
“Their days may be longer, less breaks. They may be on a different schedule. But they still have to get the same number of minutes that a school on a five-day week gets,” Claxton explained.
As for which day constitutes the extra weekend day for the four-day week students, Claxton says more times than not, it’s Monday.
“I think that comes into play with a lot of athletics, or events that happen through the weekend, so they’re still in school,” Claxton noted.
As for whether a four-day week has any effect on student achievement in either direction, Claxton says there’s currently not enough data to make a determination one way or the other.
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