“We Might Have a Mutiny on Our Hands”: Why One Texas District Won’t Abandon the Four-Day School Week

When the bell rings on Friday morning, no students in Central Athens Elementary are around to hear it. The drop-off lane is empty and the hallways are quiet, save for the few teachers who come in to prepare for the next week. Like at least 114 of Texas’s 1,207 districts, Athens Independent School District operates with a four-day instructional week. Six years into the experiment, the district’s superintendent, Janie Sims, says she would expect a staff, teacher, and parent mutiny if the change was reversed. Many teachers and parents of children in the district whom I talked to agreed.All around Texas, small, rural districts have made the switch to a four-day school week since the Legislature in 2015 changed the state’s requirements for instruction time…

The post “We Might Have a Mutiny on Our Hands”: Why One Texas District Won’t Abandon the Four-Day School Week appeared first on Texas Monthly.