Staffed Up is a monthly series examining school staffing best practices and solutions for teacher recruitment and retention. Catch up on previous installments here.
It’s been over six years since Colorado’s 27J Schools implemented a four-day school week, and Superintendent Chris Fiedler says he doesn’t foresee the district going back to a traditional schedule.
The switch to a shortened school week in Colorado’s 15th largest district came in fall 2018 after 27J Schools failed for six consecutive years to gain voter support for increasing local taxes to boost education funding, including teacher pay, according to Fiedler.
Given the competitive “dog eat dog” nature of school staffing in the Denver metro area, Fiedler says, the district had to think differently about how it would recruit and retain employees.
“The four-day week is the second-best option, and the first-best option is to pay teachers and support staff well,” says Fiedler, who has run the 23,000-student district in Brighton since 2012.
The per-pupil revenue from these local taxes, known as the Mill Levy Override, has historically decreased in 27J Schools unlike in other neighboring districts. The district's funds per pupil from local taxes, overall, consistently fall below levels in surrounding districts.
Eventually, the district was able to pass a 16% teacher pay increase with local voter approval of a Mill Levy Override in fall 2022. That raise moved 27J Schools from offering the lowest educator starting salary of the 15 Denver metro districts to two rankings higher, Fiedler says. The district’s average teacher salary was $59,030 in 2022-23.
Despite the district’s historically low teacher salaries, Fiedler says four-day school weeks have kept the school system “relevant” and competitive. “Our turnover rate has always outperformed our base teacher salary rate.”
Fiedler added that the four-day week has also helped recruit teachers who live in 27J Schools’ boundaries but had commuted to other nearby Denver districts. More teachers moving into the area from out-of-state have also joined the district, he says.
Though the four-day model may not be directly correlated to student achievement rates, Fiedler notes that the district’s overall graduation rates rose dramatically from 77.4% to 90.9% between 2017 and 2022.
27J Schools sees low teacher turnover despite low salaries, outperforming nearby districts
‘Rapid growth’ of 4-day school weeks
Districts nationwide are increasingly joining the likes of 27J Schools and hopping onto the four-day school week bandwagon. In fact, a total of about 2,100 schools across 900 districts had adopted shorter weeks as of the 2022-23 school year, says Paul Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University who researches the model.
Those numbers are up from 1,600 schools and 650 districts embracing four-day weeks in 2019-20, according to Thompson.
“There’s been rapid growth in this over the past five years,” Thompson says. “It hasn’t really slowed down since COVID. If anything, it kind of has exacerbated the need for four-day school weeks around this issue of teacher stress, teacher burnout, teacher shortages that have come out of the pandemic.”
Thompson cites teacher recruitment and retention as the key motivating factors for the latest wave of districts taking on shorter weeks. “The four-day school week may offer that additional flexibility in areas where maybe they just can’t offer teachers greater monetary compensation.”
While much anecdotal evidence suggests four-day school weeks are a successful staffing strategy for districts, there’s little empirical research measuring the impact, Thompson says.
The trend isn’t going away, Thompson adds, but pushback is emerging from state legislators seeking to slow down the expansion of four-day school weeks in states including Oklahoma, New Mexico and Missouri.
Will the competitive advantage vanish?
Some concerns have surfaced about a contagion effect in certain localities, Thompson says, meaning that as one district adopts shorter school weeks, other nearby districts may follow suit. Thompson adds that the benefit of teacher recruitment and retention may disappear as neighboring schools adopt the model. On the flip side, four-day school weeks could still be a useful staffing strategy for the teaching profession as a whole, he says.
For Missouri, teacher retention remains a concern, says Jon Turner, a professor in the School of Special Education, Leadership and Professional Studies at Missouri State University whose research includes four-day school weeks.
According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 38% of first-year teachers in the state stayed in the profession after five years, as of the 2021-22 school year.
Four-day school weeks attract teachers seeking greater work-life balance, but more importantly the model encourages teachers to stay, Turner says. About one-third of districts are using the model in the state, he adds.
“The competitive advantage is going away as we have more and more of them [four-day school weeks], but the part that they’re missing is it’s keeping people away from retiring or leaving the profession of teaching,” Turner says.
Of the 180 Missouri school districts that have adopted four-day weeks, only two school boards have voted to go back to a traditional schedule, according to Turner.
A similar pattern is seen nationwide, with only 10% of schools reverting to five-day school weeks, Thompson says. “There’s very few districts that switch back to the five-day school week, suggesting that there are benefits, or at least perceived benefits, to this school schedule.”
