Four-day school weeks are on the rise as Texas districts look for teacher perks on a tight budget

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As a small rural district with a small budget, Woodson Independent School District struggled to compete for teachers with its larger urban peers in North Texas.

“Better the teacher, the better the student's outcomes. And so we knew if we wanted to improve education for our school district, we had to be able to attract and retain really good staff,” Superintendent Casey Adams said. “And, I knew I couldn't pay more.”

So six years ago, school leaders made a change that is becoming increasingly common among districts in similar situations: They shrank the school week from five to four days.

In the 2019-20 school year, Woodson ISD was one of eight school districts in Texas that had adopted the four-day school week model. In the last two school years, that number skyrocketed to 181 districts, encompassing more than 500 school campuses in mostly rural parts of the state, a recent University of Houston study found.

That explosion came at a time when schools had gone several years without a significant increase in state funding — and when lawmakers were unwilling to give them more. In 2023, a bitter fight over school vouchers derailed a bill that would have given teachers modest raises and helped ease schools’ financial strains.

While Woodson ISD families were initially concerned about the child care needs and missed school meals that would come with losing a school day, they have come to love the four-day model, Adams said. For students that have signed up for school meals, the district provides them with sack lunches for the three-day weekend. With the support of their spouses or extended family, he said, parents have adjusted to having their kid out of school for one more day a week, something that families in other states that have adopted the model have also reported.

“Once you transition into [a four-day school week] parents make arrangements [and] make it work,” Adams said. “That transition is the hard part. But once you do it, it works itself out.”

The change has boosted morale for students and teachers, Adams said. And even though the district trimmed down a day from their school week, they increased the duration of each class, meaning teachers are actually spending more minutes with students, leading to better student outcomes, he said.

In 2021, Woodson ISD outperformed the state average in both the reading and math portions of the Texas' standardized test, STAAR. By 2025, the district lagged the state in both domains, according to state data released Friday.

But as four-day school weeks have become more popular across the country, the model has also raised some concerns. Research in other states shows the switch has had negative effects on students’ math and reading scores.

And while experts say not enough research has been done in Texas to weigh the impacts of four-day school weeks on student performance, there are some warning signs: A Texas Education Agency study conducted in the 2022-23 school year found that districts with four-day school weeks had lower STAAR test scores than districts with a traditional calendar.

But even though lawmakers approved this year a funding boost for schools that includes money for staff raises — with larger increases for rural teachers — many districts say they don’t have plans to switch back to five-day school weeks any time soon.

“Our community [and] my staff would be very upset if we had to go back,” Adams said.

An alternative to bigger paychecks

In 2015, Texas lawmakers approved House Bill 2610, which changed the minimum instruction time public schools are required to provide to students from 180 days to 75,600 minutes per school year. It was aimed to give school districts the flexibility to make up for lost instruction time when affected by extreme weather or other unexpected disruptions.

Some districts took advantage of that flexibility to compact their school weeks, a move they hoped would help them compete for teachers: If they couldn’t offer educators bigger paychecks, they hoped they could attract them by offering them shorter work weeks and more free time.

Decisions to adopt the policy are usually financially motivated. Schools have reported making the switch to four-day school weeks to save money on transportation, support staff and food costs, said Emily Morton with the education research group NWEA.

The growing interest in the model comes at a time when many districts are reporting teacher shortages and profound financial challenges stemming from years of inflation, stagnant state funds and the Texas Legislature’s failure to increase them in 2023 over the fight for school vouchers.

During this year’s legislative session, after approving a $1 billion school voucher program, state lawmakers passed House Bill 2, an $8.5 billion boost in public education funding that includes salary raises for educators, with larger increases for teachers in rural districts. Teachers with three to four years of experience in districts with 5,000 or fewer students will receive a $4,000 raise, while those with more than five years of experience will earn $8,000.

Those raises do not make up for the lack of investment in public education in previous years, said Tiffany Whitsel, assistant superintendent at Rockdale ISD. The 1,500-student district, located halfway between Austin and College Station, adopted a partial four-day school week model in 2022.

“That $5,000 and $8,000 was nice, but what about the last 10 years that we've been behind?” she said.

As a district with a hybrid schedule, Rockdale ISD starts the school year with traditional five-day weeks and then transitions to four-day weeks in the middle of each semester. To help working families, the district offers a child care service during the extra day off for students in sixth grade or lower, Whitsel said.

The district's move to a hybrid schedule has led to a happier staff at school, Whitsel said. Teachers have more time to spend with their families, run errands and do other tasks at school as needed, Whitsel said.

The model has served as an attractive perk that lets them compete for teachers with higher-paying urban school districts, Whitsel said. “We just don't have the tax base that some of the districts around us have so we have to look at some different incentives when we hire,” she said.

The four-day school week experience

When Woodson ISD made the switch to four-day school weeks, the district had no clear answers for how the new schedule would affect kids with disabilities, Mamie Lester said.

As the grandmother and guardian to three kids with special needs, Lester was worried about how the new schedule would affect her children with autism and ADHD.

“I gave the school a six-week time period to see how it was going to affect them, and then if it affected them in an adverse way, I was willing to transfer them to another school,” she said.

Lester said she noticed positive changes in her children during that window. The extra day gave them the opportunity to catch up on school work and decompress from the week.

“My kids loved it, once the routine was set. It just all worked [out]. Where I was thinking that it would mess up medication times and [that] the effect of their medications may run out before the end of the school day, it was completely OK,” Lester said.

Their academic performance also improved after the new schedule went into effect, she said.

“Typical children or children with disabilities, if they're happy, their test scores are going to be better,” Lester said.

Roni Mills, a high school math teacher who has been with Woodson ISD for eight years, said the four-day school week has been largely beneficial for her students.

“I feel like I get more from them in the four days than I did in the five," Mills said. “They just seem more motivated to learn. They value the classroom time, and I think probably the biggest difference I see in my classroom is the kids' attitudes.”

Since the school moved to a four-day model, Mills said she has developed a better relationship with her dual credit students. Outside of the classroom, she has more time with her family during the week. Despite the initial hesitation to switch to the new model, she said she would have a hard time moving back to a school with a traditional schedule now.

In the last five years, more than 1,600 schools in 650 districts across several states, including Colorado, Oklahoma and Oregon, have embraced four-day school weeks. They often cite concerns over teacher recruitment, turnover and costs when making the decision, according to research.

But while school leaders in Texas have said the model has helped them attract educators, research from other states suggests the incentive may not be as attractive as they think, Morton said.

Four-day school weeks are “perhaps not a big enough factor to actually have a significant influence on recruitment or retention decisions over other things like salary, that we know are really impactful on driving teacher employment decisions,” Morton said.

In other states, research has also found negative effects on student test scores. For an average fifth grader, these negative effects amount to an average of four weeks of lost learning, Morton said.

The study the TEA conducted during the 2022-23 school year found that Texas schools with a four-day model had lower test scores than those with traditional school weeks. However, the study noted that the differences were small and at times insignificant. It’s also unclear how the lingering effects on learning from the pandemic or a 2023 redesign of the STAAR test might have impacted those schools’ scores.

David DeMatthews, an education researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, said improving academic performance is rarely the driving force for making the switch to four-day school weeks. Researchers have consistently found that high-performing districts almost never do it, he said.

“If superintendents and school boards believed that four-day school weeks could improve instruction, why wouldn’t higher-performing and average-performing districts also be adopting such policies? They don’t because there is no clear theory of action for why a four-day week would improve outcomes,” DeMatthews said.

Adams, the Woodson ISD superintendent, said switching to a four-day school week has been beneficial for student success.

With the new model, students have been more involved in extracurricular activities and have an extra school free day to dedicate to their school work, he said.

The extra school day off has especially been beneficial for high school students in dual-credit classes who are also pursuing their associates degree, Adams said. The four-day model gives them the time to focus on their school work and get more attention from teachers as needed.

In general, the model has led to students being better rested and happier, Adams said.

“A lot of people that talk negatively about it may not even have any experience or know anything about a four-day school week. They just assume,” he said. “It's unique to each school district on how effective or ineffective it can be.”

Rob Reid contributed to this story.

Disclosure: University of Houston has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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