After Teller Elementary School announced plans to set aside half a day every Friday next year for teachers to plan lessons, analyze student performance data and take time for professional development, Principal Sabrina Bates received a slew of sharp words from parents: “You obviously don’t care about our kids,” one fired-up parent wrote. Another sounded off in an email, complaining “the kids barely get enough time to be schooled as it is.”
Teller Elementary School, in east Denver, will add to more than 80 out of 207 district-run schools in Denver that will cut classroom time to make room for teacher planning and professional development next year, raising concerns among some parents that schools are going too far in scaling back hours of instruction.
More than 80 schools under Denver Public Schools have an early release this school year while another nine schools include a late start in their schedule, according to district data. It’s not clear how many of those schools have converted those hours into time for teacher planning.
Teachers’ need for more time, however, is colliding with the same need among many parents, particularly those with rigid work schedules — leading to a polarizing pair of questions: How many hours should kids be in school, and what are schools responsible for during those hours?
Administrators like Bates say that as teachers’ responsibilities have continued to multiply, particularly since the onset of the pandemic, it’s become critical to carve out more time during their school day working hours for them to tackle parts of their job they simply don’t have the capacity to prioritize. Preserving extra time for teachers is one way she is optimistic she can also keep her best teachers and recruit other top-tier educators — at a time 128 of Colorado’s 178 school districts are using four-day school weeks to draw teachers to their classrooms.
The Colorado Department of Education requires schools operate at least 160 days per year, with middle and high schoolers in classroom seats at least 1,080 hours per school year and elementary schoolers spending at least 990 hours learning per year.
There is some wiggle room. After accounting for teacher work days and parent-teacher conferences, middle and high schools must clock at least 1,056 hours while elementary schools must tally at least 968 hours. Schools also add contingency days onto the academic calendar in case snow days, school threats or violence, or the death of a teacher impact school hours during the year.
It’s not unusual for schools to have a late start or early release day each week, said Jennifer Okes, chief operating officer of CDE.
“As long as they have the number of hours, we have no concerns with that,” Okes said, noting that CDE verified that Teller Elementary School still will meet seat time requirements next year.
Even with early-release Fridays, the school — which has about 560 kids in preschool through fifth grade — will exceed the state’s mandated number of hours next year, with instruction time totaling 1,134.5 hours, according to Bates.
Bates decided to begin sending students home early every Friday next year after collecting feedback from staff on both the school’s bell schedule and the prospect of a regular late start or early release. The district approved an early release day for the school Jan. 2, according to Bates, who wrote in a Jan. 5 email to families that Fridays tend to have the highest rates of student absenteeism and more parents pick their child up early that day.
Teachers need those afternoons to work on tasks they must otherwise try to squeeze into their 40-minute daily planning period, including building on strategies to help students grow and collaborating with their colleagues on lessons and curriculum. Bates said teacher planning periods are often filled by meetings to review student data or discuss a learning plan for a student with special needs.
“It’s a very short period of time to get clerical work done, to get any type of professional learning done, to take a deeper dive and look at individual student data,” she told The Colorado Sun. “Anything outside of instruction, they’re given 40 minutes a day to do that.”
And it’s “never enough,” she added.
Teachers’ time has only become more constricted as their responsibilities have ballooned, Bates said.
Teachers have had to broaden their focus to help students battling mental health struggles and incorporate social-emotional learning into their classrooms. They have also had to adapt to teaching groups of students with much greater learning differences in classrooms that feel “very split,” Bates said, with some students excelling well above grade level and others falling severely behind.
Additionally, educators must take two years of extra courses on their own time to earn a DPS endorsement that enables them to teach gifted and talented students. They must also complete additional professional development centered on equity this school year, Bates said.
Another major responsibility: Both teachers and building leaders are obligated to complete state training modules on the science of reading.
“It’s evergrowing,” Bates said. “It’s at the point now where it’s just not sustainable in a 40-hour work week.”
Bates made the decision to swap student learning time for teacher planning time without input from the community — part of what sparked backlash among some parents.
“The community doesn’t know what happens in a given school day nor should they have a say in when teachers get release time or not,” she said. “That’s something that I need to know from my teachers, not families.”
Many more parents, however, have trusted her decision, with hundreds emailing her to reinforce their support for Teller Elementary’s teachers and staff, she said.
Denver Public Schools isn’t the only Colorado district where schools have modified the school day schedule to grant teachers more time for duties beyond instruction. Boulder Valley School District began a one-hour late start every Wednesday for most of its schools in August 2022.
Once a month, teachers use that hour for districtwide training within virtual sessions, through which teachers might pick up strategies to better assist their students learning English or better understand how to structure the classroom so that all students have the best chance to learn, said Katie Mills, BVSD’s director of professional learning.
The other hours throughout the month are reserved for school-based conversations with teams and administrators, including data analyses of standards-based assessments they’ve given students so they can pinpoint which students need more support, said Deputy Superintendent Lora De La Cruz.
“What is it that students need?” De La Cruz said. “What did our data tell us? What did these assessments tell us that our students need? And how are we going to plan for that so that our very next lesson or very next day is ready for the students who need something different?”
That hour each week ultimately helps students, even though they’re not in class, the district administrators say.
“What we know with 100% certainty is that in order to meet the needs of each and every student, our teachers need to be very in tune with the needs of each and every student, and they need to be resourced and ready with the skills and the supports that they need to respond to those needs that they’ve identified,” De La Cruz said. “And if we want our teachers to have an opportunity to enhance their practices to better respond to students, we need to give them the opportunity to do that.”
“You don’t learn more by not being in school”
Bronwen Clark, whose two sons attend Teller Elementary School, said the school’s decision to curb learning time sent shock waves throughout the community, where many parents are highly involved in their child’s education.
“It wasn’t on anyone’s radar,” said Clark, whose boys are in second grade and fifth grade. “It wasn’t on any parent’s radar.”
She has mixed feelings about the new schedule and sympathizes with the time constraints of teachers at Teller Elementary, particularly as they try to prod students along in each class and help students who don’t have enough food or housing as well as students learning English.
“Teachers need time to integrate all of those different kinds of needs in their classroom, to understand how to serve all those different kinds of need,” Clark said. “I do think there’s value in giving them time. It’s a tough balance.”
On the other end of that balance is her family. Both she and her husband work from home and while they have some flexibility, she anticipates she’ll have to split her focus on Friday afternoons next year to keep one eye on her younger son, who will still be at Teller Elementary School.
Jasmine McComas, whose son is a second grader at Teller, said she understands why teacher considerations needed to be the main driver of the decision to start regular early-release days, but she was also surprised that school administrators didn’t incorporate parents into a conversation.
“I feel like as a parent with my son’s education, it’s really important that I have input as part of the team,” McComas said.
She acknowledges that the additional planning time will benefit teachers but wonders where it will leave students.
“I’m very curious to see how those hours will be made up in the academics,” McComas said. “It seems like a lot of hours when you’re putting them together.”
She also has questions about whether Teller Elementary School will have enough space to accommodate all students who need after-school care on Fridays.
The school will offer Discovery Link, a before- and after-school program provided by the district, with 150 spots currently available at the school. Bates anticipates the district will increase the school’s licensing capacity for the program next year since more students are likely to need care.
The school will also continue a variety of enrichment programs, including cooking, fencing, art, music, rugby and disc golf. More than 500 students participate in enrichment programs at the school each week, according to Bates.
Still, parents like Clark worry about their kids losing out on learning time.
She echoed her husband’s concerns: “You don’t learn more by not being in school.”