By Anton Riecher
With a decision required by Dec. 5, the Devine school board tabled action on moving to a four-day school week for the 2025-2026 school calendar with plans for a called meeting in the near future.
In the face of opposition from board member Renee Frieda and a quorum of only five members present for the Monday meeting, the board opted to table action until a full board could be present.
Frieda cited a lack of research on the impact on families with both parents working for her opposition. She and others also expressed concern about how the change in schedule might affect the learning routine for kindergarten and elementary students.
“I still don’t think we did our due diligence with the people who I think are the most negatively impacted,” she said.
However, a motion by Frieda to stick with a five-day school week for the coming school year died for lack of a second.
More than 2,100 public schools in 25 states have switched to a four-day school week, often in hopes of recruiting teachers, saving money and boosting attendance, researchers estimate. Rural schools facing significant teacher shortages have led the trend, choosing to take off Mondays and Fridays to give employees and students a three-day weekend.
To make up for the lost day of instruction, school officials typically tack time onto the remaining four days.
District Superintendent Todd Grandjean recommended moving to the four-day schedule, citing the need to attract and retain qualified teaching talent as the primary advantage.
“What we came down to was, in the end, it is a focus on attracting highly qualified talent and retaining the teachers that we have,” Grandjean said. “That in itself will have a positive impact on our students.”
Consequences with regard to students remain largely undetermined, he said.
“In the beginning, student performance, student attendance and student success were looked at,” Grandjean said. “We were unable to determine whether or not that had a positive or negative growth cycle.”
The district has focused on the La Vernia and Bandera school districts in its research on implementing a four-day week.
“My recommendation is to approve the four-day work week and then for you to ask us (staff) to prepare a 2025-2026 proposed academic calendar,” Grandjean said.
Frieda countered that the board is sworn to make decisions “on the basis of what is in the best interest of the kids, not parents or teachers.”
“While I can see that attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers absolutely benefits kids, at the core, this is an experiment that we don’t yet know the impact it would have on the kids,” she said.
Some of the most important components of early education is consistency and routine, Frieda said.
“When you’re teaching fundamentals to kids and they have three-day breaks instead of two-day breaks what kind of loss to we have as far as consistency,” she said.
She also expressed concern that a longer school day for younger students might mean instruction time sacrificed to facilitate more athletics and nap periods.
Responding to a question from the audience about whether the problems for parents and their work schedules board president Nancy Pepper said that district moving to a four-day week often compensate with special programs.
Unfortunately, those districts report that over time participation in those programs drop to near zero, she said.
Frieda said she grew up in a low-income family with five children and that “it would have been very problematic for my parents had they not been in school five days a week.”
“I’m raising my kids not in a low-income family and it would have been very problematic for me to determine how we would handle childcare when my child was younger,” she said.
The only solution available would have been to move the child to a different school district, Frieda said.
Other members of the board said that the need to attract qualified teachers remained a powerful incentive to move to the four-day week.
“We have core positions that we can’t fill where people are going to the districts around us with four-day weeks even though our pay is right up there with those,” board member Chris Davis said.
Pepper said that of the two missing board members – Carl Brown and Henry Moreno – one indicated support for moving to the reduced week for staffing reasons while the other remains uncommitted.
No date was set for the special meeting needed to decide the issue.
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