Washington’s 4-day school week meeting is Wednesday night

WASHINGTON — School district decision-makers and administrators will hold an informational meeting Wednesday night to discuss a possible four-day school week in the 2024-25 school year. Here’s everything you need to know before the meeting, scheduled from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Jan. 15 at the high school auditorium.

What will be discussed?

School administrators say Wednesday night’s meeting will start with a roughly 20-minute presentation breaking down the logistics of a four-day school week, the reasons for its consideration, and info on how it’s affected other districts.

After that, the gathered community members will break out into groups, each joining one school board member and district or building administrator, to give feedback on the ideas. Superintendent Willie Stone said he hoped both to answer questions and build a list of issues the district hadn’t considered yet.

“Really, we just want to listen,” he said at a school board meeting last week. “What are your concerns, what are things you think are going well? … We’ll have our administrators documenting that, I want to get that information, look at the questions we’re still worried about, and get that information out to the community fairly quickly.”

One week after the roundtable discussion, Washington expects to release a list of FAQs to the community, addressing any issues officials can’t answer Wednesday night.

What would a four-day week look like?

Washington hasn’t declared outright how it would structure its four-day weeks, if they come to fruition. A potential schedule model shared by the schools in a seven-page “information snapshot” last week said each school day would extend by about 30 minutes, starting 15 earlier and ending 15 later.

For each building, the new bell schedule could look something like this, according to the snapshot:

One model discussed in 2024 would see the schools follow five-day weeks for part of the year, but four-day weeks for the rest. Students at Highland and WACO, two districts nearby with four-day weeks, use them year-round, with students taking every Friday off.

It’s also not clear if Washington’s schools would take Mondays of Fridays off for the four-day week. A survey held last year showed 55% of student respondents preferred taking Mondays off, while 68% of staff and 80% of community members preferred Friday.

The final calendar and schedule would be approved by the school board, if it opts to move forward with a four-day model, according to the information snapshot.

Why a four-day school week?

Advocates have argued a four-day academic week could offer myriad benefits for schools. Some notes in Washington’s information snapshot suggested the extra time off would improve mental health for students and staff, boost attendance, improve the quality of teachers’ professional development time, and help district residents plan business-hour doctor appointments and family events without missing class.

The most widely discussed upside, however, tends to be teacher recruitment. School officials at Highland said the switch to four days this year helped attract teaching talent, especially among younger professionals who said they appreciated long weekends.

“The research is clear: The single most important factor in student success is a well-prepared and planned teacher functioning at their best daily,” the district’s information snapshot said. “Washington CSD spends a great deal of time and resources training our new and veteran teachers annually, only to observe high turnover rates each school year.”

In Southeast Iowa, most of the districts switching to four-day school weeks have smaller student bodies. WACO was the first in the state to try the model, launching it about a decade ago. Highland and Winfield-Mt. Union, trying it for the first time this year, have enrollment counts of about 589 and 316, respectively.

While those neighboring districts offer compelling anecdotes about the four-day model’s attractiveness to job applicants, academic literature on the matter is inconclusive.

A study from Lindenwood University in 2019 found over 75% of teachers responding to a survey “had not considered applying to a five-day” week after their respective districts implemented a four-day model. But a working paper from the Anneberg Institute in September of 2024 suggested the model actually worsened teacher turnover, based on data collected in Oregon.

“Although a potential promise of the 4dsw [four-day school week] is that it can provide a non-monetary benefit to attract teachers when raising salaries is difficult, our results cast doubt on the idea that this will always work,” wrote the authors of that study. “Turnover increased in the long term again when salaries began to fall further behind relative to 5dsw districts … even those that may experience initial success with the 4dsw neglect maintaining competitive salaries at their own peril.”

Other potential downsides discussed in Washington have included the lack of child care for younger students on days off, as well as the potential risk of food insecurity for students who rely on the district for free or reduced-cost meals five days a week.

When to expect a decision?

School board members tentatively expect to hold a work session about the four-day school week after this week’s community meeting. If and when Washington adopts the schedule may depend on talks at that point.

Decision-makers could enact the change as early as Feb. 12, the next regular board meeting. If they do, it would take effect next as early as the 2025-26 academic year. If they end up deciding any later than Feb. 12, however, board members signaled they’d delay implementation until 2026-27, hoping to avoid a chaotic scramble to organize plans with the next school year just a few months away.

“If we don’t feel comfortable making a decision now, it may not be that we’re never doing it, it’d just mean, ‘Hey, we can’t until October of next year, or September,’” Stone said. “The nice thing, if we go until next year, then we’ll have raw data from Saydel, which is a school district our size.”

A decision timeline provided by the district shows schools releasing a list of FAQs to the community Jan. 22, followed by a new community survey on Jan. 29. The document said decision-makers would spend January and February looking through draft calendars and schedules under four-day school week models, ahead of the Feb. 12 school board decision.

What do community members think?

The answer to this question isn’t easy to find, thus the call for a feedback-gathering meeting this week.

A survey held in early 2024 found the majority of student, staff and community member respondents were in favor of a four-day school week, by a more than 2:1 ratio in every group. But school officials said they worried that feedback didn’t represent the entire district, citing low response rates and the ability of anyone to fill out the form, regardless of their relationship with the schools.

Stone said another survey was in the works, and would collect feedback before the Feb. 12 meeting. It will collect feedback only from students, staff, and district family members, not open to the general public.

“We’re going to survey the people that if affects,” Stone said. “I talked to Saydel, one of the problems they had, they had people from California voting on their survey. And if you open it totally up, that's what happens.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com