Jasper community considers first year of four-day weeks

The schedule has come under fire in neighboring Oklahoma, where it has been adopted by roughly one-third of the school districts, but Day and others in his neighborhood say they are happy with the new schedule.

Hydee Zaerr, 37, was an early skeptic, but she says the policy has worked for her children, who are in elementary school.

Christina Hess, the high school principal and incoming superintendent of the 476-student district, pointed to a dramatic decrease in disciplinary reports, which dropped by two-thirds to 106, as evidence that students are adjusting well to the new approach.

Financial concerns drove the new schedule, which shifts fiscal burdens to support staff in the district and parents who have cut into their work schedules to care for their children on Mondays.

Hess says the district's end-of-course exam scores have declined, which she attributes to a curriculum shift implemented at the beginning of the year.

Administrators cut summer school, the pre-K program, an elementary teacher and the district's only Spanish instructor.

The policy was an anomaly on the education policy landscape until the 1970s, when school districts went looking for fuel savings amid the OPEC oil supply crisis.

Large, sparsely populated rural districts adopted the program to cut into the miles covered by school buses.

Like Jasper, which added thirty minutes to each school day, most four-day districts say their students are spending roughly the same amount of time in the classroom on the new schedule as they would during a five-day week.

Chad Karr, Jasper chief of police, says area teenagers haven't changed their schedule to match the district.