Parent Jason Breckenridge, pictured here with his wife Megan, sued Montana’s Florence-Carlton school district over its plans to shift to a four-day school week. They felt the school district disregarded negative aspects of the shortened week. (Credit: Sarah Mosquera for The Hechinger Report)
After years of putting it off, Montana’s Florence-Carlton school district had to decide: Would it join the many smaller districts in the state with a four-day school week, or stick with a five-day schedule?
Until recently, some local education leaders thought the four-day week was a poor fit for the town of Florence. Staffing problems, including having to cut nine employees, the end of pandemic-era education funding, and the loss of 50 students this school year, however, put the district of about 730 students in a tight spot.
Florence, a rural town in the southwestern part of the state 30 minutes from two districts that pay their teachers more, has dealt with staffing gaps that left positions near impossible to fill. Last school year, the high school principal ended up teaching some classes after a job posting for a math teacher received no applications for a semester and a science teacher left for a better paying job nearby. A paraprofessional job has remained open the entire school year, Florence-Carlton Superintendent Todd Fiske said. A four-day school week might be a tool to recruit and retain staff, the school board reasoned, while offering families more time together.
A community survey showing that of parents and community members who responded, 51 percent favored a shift to a four-day school week. The five-person board approved the model 3-to-1 in January, with one abstention. Starting this fall, the school day will be lengthened by 45 minutes, and schools will be closed on Fridays.
While most such shifts across other Montana districts have been made with little opposition, in Florence, pushback was fierce.
There were standing-room-only public meetings with community members threatening not to support future budget levies. Parents filed two formal complaints. One family sued. Some are transferring their children to districts miles away next year or will take on homeschooling out of concern their kids would otherwise fall behind.
Some board members were taken aback.
“Ninety-nine percent of the people in this room have not been to a meeting that I’ve seen,” board chair Matthew Roth, who voted against the change, told a crowded public meeting in March. “Only when this comes up, people are showing up.”
The rift in the community exposes a larger divide and uncertainty around the four-day school week, even as districts in Montana and across the country continue to march toward it. Nearly 40 percent of Montana districts have students attend school four days a week and about 80 percent of the state’s counties have at least one school operating on that schedule. In 2022 and 2023,32 districts in the state adopted the model. Nationwide, the number of four-day districts in the U.S. is approaching 900 in 26 states; the model picked up steam after the pandemic. Districts continue to consider it a solution for addressing staffing shortages and financial challenges.
In Florence, located in a valley between a pair of mountain ranges, parent Jason Breckenridge was the one who sued to stop the change, saying he was worried his kids would be “guinea pigs.” He felt the school district disregarded negative aspects of the shortened week. Virginia Mahn, a Florence-Carlton parent and graduate, brought a complaint against the school board, alleging district leaders failed to meet their required responsibility of ensuring a quality education.
“The only things they showed as positives were anecdotal,” Mahn said. “It’d be an article from a superintendent that was like, ‘This is great for us.’ OK, so where’s your data?”
Montana first allowed the four-day school week in 2005, replacing a requirement for a 180-day school year with a 1,080-hour minimum to allow for “greater flexibility in the school calendar.” A three-part study from the University of Montana painted a grim picture of the four-day school week’s outcomes for both students and their schools.
Based on student testing data from 2008 to 2023, the study found that student learning suffered in the four-day school week. At the elementary level, reading proficiency was lower in the four-day districts by as much as 7 percentage points. For math proficiency, it was a difference of up to 14 percentage points. Including one-room schoolhouses, only 11 of the 141 four-day districts examined performed above the state averages or were improving academically.
The Montana Office of Public Instruction commissioned the study after the state saw a surge in four-day school weeks post-Covid and gave researchers access to data going back to when Montana schools first started making the switch. It’s not just Montana: Four-day school weeks are growing across the nation, as is other research that also shows negatives in academic outcomes.
“When I look at the news reporting and schools [that] are considering the four-day, there’s all these reasons, pros and cons,” said Bill McCaw, one of the authors of the study. “Student achievement is never part of the conversation. Day care, convenience, longer vacation — all that’s being discussed. But not student achievement.”
