Emergency days and the four day workweek
Monthly calander of Maria Carrillo High School from the Maria Carrillo School official website
By Logan Cheriff, staff writer
Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday? I’m not one to complain about an extra day or two off school. I, like most students, am totally on board. Some may have noticed our district's school calendar reflects an unusual amount of three-day weekends. It’s sometimes caused by professional development days or national holidays, like Lincoln's birthday, but there’s an interesting third reason. Our district adjusts our school schedule with something called Emergency Days.
Emergency days were implemented as a precaution for the fire months in Northern California. While we’ve dodged the fires in recent years, the district agreed we can’t afford to take any chances after the damage sustained from the Tubbs Fire in 2017, the Kincade Fire in 2019, and the Glass Fire in 2020. Emergency days were put in place with the idea that students would likely miss school while evacuated from the fire and smoke, or be unable to attend due to power outages in the area. Since 2020, we haven’t had a fire that caused evacuations or resulted in power outages, so what do we do with the extra days? Well, there’s a set number of days students are legally obligated to be in school in California depending on the school, somewhere between 180 and 185 instructional days that meet the 64,800 minute requirement for high school grades are required. If the District doesn’t meet the required number of instructional minutes, they may receive a funding penalty. The school board agreed on a schedule for the past few years, where the extra days are placed on Fridays to create one or two extra long weekends. This year they’re on April 14 and May 19.
When emergency days line up with other days off school, like professional development days and holidays, students get to experience multiple three-day weekends back to back. I’ve at times even gotten into the routine of a fourday school week. When having an extra day on the weekend becomes a pattern, students may struggle to get back into the swing of the full five days. This brings up an important question: Do we really need that extra day of schooling? A shorter week is something many students might support, considering their dislike of the Wednesday all-period model. “On Wednesdays right now, I feel like teachers end up having to teach the class in a rushed manner,” mentioned senior Ellie Acosta. Senior Bella Zarate agreed, saying, “I don’t enjoy how it's in the middle of the week. I liked it when it was on Monday, but teachers still assign homework on Wednesday, making it harder to manage.” “I prefer block days because it gives me more time to get into the material…and the Wednesday system doesn't allow for that,”said junior Luke Negri.
The idea of a four-day workweek can be traced back to 1817 from labor activist and social reformist Robert Owen, who advocated for “eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” While an old example, It still hold weight today. More recent examples of the implementation of a four-day workweek include the insanely successful Microsoft Japan 4-day workweek experiment, which saw an increase in productivity by 40%, according to National Public Radio. A division of Microsoft in Japan gave workers Fridays off, and along with the increase in productivity, it was widely accepted by employees. “In a 2021 survey, 79 percent of remote employees said they felt burned out on a monthly basis, and more than half said they felt burned out weekly,” according to an article about the four-day workweek from bambooHR. A problem fixable through an alternative work schedule.
Obviously, this system is used in the workplace, but it can be easily adapted to fit a school like ours. In fact, there are already schools doing it or schools in the process of making the switch. A 2015 bill passed in Texas changed the requirements for the time kids spent in school. Instead of 180 days, they went with a 75,600 minutes model, allowing districts more flexibility when designing their schedules. Sixty Districts in Texas have already announced they’re making the switch to a four-day school week next year. I would love to propose California hop on the four-day school week train, but there might be a few hurdles.
To start out, a bill similar to the one passed in Texas would need to be implemented in order for a four-day workweek to be possible in California. Our state's requirements don’t allow the leniency and flexibility of the rules in Texas. There are also arguments to be made that schools implementing a four-day workweek perform lower on English and math subject tests. While these results may be true for the schools studied, most of the schools were part of more rural areas with less student attendance, as seen in an article by Edsource, as well as separate studies yielding different data. It is important to note that no system is foolproof, and the four-day workweek is a new system with the chance of having kinks that need to be worked out.
That being said, this is not an idea to be taken lightly or entirely swept under the rug. As previously outlined, the possible benefits of such a system could be limitless. As we continue to advance our studies of the youth of future generations, it’s important to consider the weight and value education holds in children's lives. I think it’s worth investing time, money, and possibly making mistakes to find the right way to educate our nation's kids.