Jasper community considers first year of four-day weeks

JASPER, Mo. -- By the time Jeffrey Day woke up after the Sunday-night shift, the neighborhood kids were at play. A few doors down, a curious middle-school boy trailed after a working carpenter. Day's children played inside the house, waiting for their father's OK before taking their games outside.

The school year had not ended last Monday, but school was not in session. Jasper switched last year to a four-day weekly schedule, joining an increasing number of rural districts across the state and the country.

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 said they are happy with the new schedule.

"I don't mind it," he said. "Doesn't matter to me if it's four days or five days."

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

"When we first started, I thought it was awful," she said. "How can you get in a full week of education (in four days)? But actually, the kids want to go to school more now."

Administrators said the program is working, and it is set to continue next year. 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 students are adjusting well to the new approach. She said attendance also has improved.

Caleb Roughton, a 17-year-old junior at the high school, said the schedule has given him more time to work on his family's farm. On Monday afternoons, he travels to the district's vocational center, where he is training to become a welder.

Hess said the district doesn't know whether it saved money in the first year of the policy. 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.

"Most of the time, I take the day off," said Nichole Newby, a mother of four elementary children. "It's been an adjustment for sure."

She said she doesn't think the new schedule has reduced the quality of education her children are receiving.

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

Those scores will feed into the state's evaluations of the district. If Jasper's state scores decline for two years after it adopted the new schedule, state law requires it reinstate the five-day week.

Mondays were just the latest cut for a district that has faced mounting financial pressures. Administrators cut summer school, the pre-K program, an elementary teacher and the district's only Spanish instructor.

The pinch has come from multiple quarters, Hess said. District voters were reluctant to raise levies, partly because of resistance from large farm operators who bear the brunt of the burden. Jasper schools received 5 percent less in local tax revenue than the average Missouri district in 2015.

Meanwhile, the Missouri Legislature for several years did not allocate enough school funds to meet a legally established minimum, a streak that ended only with the recently concluded legislative session.

Across the state, small rural districts have responded by reducing the number of days students attend school. 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.

Most districts that use the schedule are west of the Mississippi River, but the policy did not take root in Missouri until 2011, when the state began to measure school-time requirements in hours instead of days. In the coming year, 18 of the state's more than 500 districts will operate on a four-day schedule.

Like Jasper, which added 30 minutes to each school day, most four-day districts said 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. The Lexington School District, the only one in the state to drop the policy after adopting it, did so partly because the extra time added to each day made school too long.

In Oklahoma, another state that has struggled to fund its schools, the number of adopters skyrocketed last year. Political alarm grew as more than a third of the state's school districts amended their schedules, many of them in the last several years. Gov. Mary Fallin termed it an "epidemic," calling into question whether districts will save as much money with the schedule as they say.

Fallin ordered a study of four-day districts in Oklahoma, which she said justified her concern. Looking at 16 districts across the state, the Oklahoma State Department of Education found they spent more money than usual during the 2015-2016 year or the same amount.

Hess, the Jasper principal, is skeptical.

"What are they doing wrong?" she asked.

She recalled "hard conversations" with 13 support staffers -- custodians, bus drivers, secretaries and paraprofessionals -- whom she moved to part time, reducing their hours and cutting any health-insurance benefits. She is confident the district will save money as a result, though she said the district has not finished processing its financial data for the year.

Dustin Storm, superintendent of Miller Schools, said his district has saved roughly 1 percent annually since going to a four-day week two years ago.

"It's been a positive for the most part," he said. "Our staff, our kids, our families -- the overall consensus is that we've been pleased with it."

Storm said the driving force behind his district's shift had more to do with teachers than the budget.

"Our main purpose was to attract and keep highly qualified staff," he said -- the sort of people who might be loathe to commute to rural Miller from a larger city without the incentive of a four-day work schedule.

Hess concurs: "Teachers love it," she said. "That is part of the beauty of it."

The Jasper community seems to agree.

"It's not a problem for me; we live in the country and there's always farm work," said Steve Vailes, 36, a self-employed carpenter with four children in the district.

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

"We were expecting Sunday nights to become like Saturday nights as far as the teenagers being out and about," he said. "But it's been pretty quiet."

Jasper added 30 minutes to each school day to make up for the lost Mondays.

Information from: The Joplin (Mo.) Globe, http://www.joplinglobe.com

Pertinent address:

Jasper, Mo.