Mesquite ISD chooses not to adopt 4-day week, says it has negative impact
MESQUITE (CBSNewsTexas) – Four-day school weeks have become all the rage across Texas as a way to recruit and retain teachers.
But one North Texas school district made a surprising decision Monday night not to adopt it and presented research showing that it has a significant negative impact on student performance.
It made a mother proud when Kali Shumate helped open tonight's Mesquite ISD board meeting.
The kindergartner and her brother, who's in the second grade, have a single mother who needs them in school five days a week.
"School is really my only daycare during the week," said Mesquite ISD parent Dominique Bailey.
She became worried when Mesquite ISD considered adopting the popular four-day school week calendar starting next fall.
"I just felt like it was going to be a burden on parents trying to find babysitters on a Friday," she said.
But Monday night, Mesquite's school board instead decided against the Monday through Thursday schedule as an incentive to retain and recruit more teachers.
The district will instead offer more four-day weekends and planning days during the school year as well as give teachers a full week off in the fall to address issues that have been driving people away from the profession.
"Such as better work life balance, more time off more time for planning that sort of thing," said Mesquite ISD Chief Information Officer Laura Jobe.
School days will start 15 minutes earlier, at 7:40 a.m., to compensate for the extra days off.
Mesquite ISD also rejected four-day school weeks after reading a Brown University study that found that students were falling behind in math and reading.
"The negative effects of the schedule are disproportionately larger in non-rural schools than rural schools and for female students, and they may grow over time."
"And what we saw was that it disproportionately impacted Hispanic and African-American students and bilingual students, and that's the majority of our student population so we just took that as a caution and a chance to pause," said Jobe.
The school board also approved a slight pay raise in a district that right now could use 40 more teachers.
Mesquite ISD is also worried about talk that the Texas legislature might follow the lead of some other states that have banned four-day school weeks.
Even though there are no current bills filed, it's a lingering concern that looms over the growing number of districts across Texas that are adopting it for the next school year.