By the time many Colorado kids who attend school four days a week graduate high school, their education is cut two years short.
It’s a math problem driven by a state funding problem that creates many more problems, according to Philip Qualman, the superintendent of Eagle County School District.
Qualman calculates it like this: Students enrolled in districts that run on four-day school weeks are in school under 160 days per year, with some down to 150 days, compared with the 180 days many of their peers across the country attend school. Those students are in school 30 fewer days, which adds up to six weeks in a single school year. Over the span of a student’s time in grades K-12, that shaves about two years off the total time they spend in school.
“Our state is in a desperate place and the only lever that districts have found where they can make adjustments is in time,” said Qualman, whose district has stuck with a five-day schedule. “So our students, they’re part-time students and they’re working with part-time teachers and they’re getting a part-time education. If that’s what we want to fund as a state, then we can keep doing what we’re doing.”
As more Colorado districts have joined the movement toward a four-day school week, it’s become a controversial schedule, with questions around whether fewer days in the classroom jeopardize students’ potential and make a difference in recruiting teachers. The state counted 133 — out of 185 — districts, charter school operators and boards of cooperative educational services on a four-day schedule last fall.
Most of them are in rural Colorado, though the four-day trend has crept into larger districts in more populated parts of the state, including 27J Schools in Brighton and Pueblo School District 60. While they hold classes fewer days, they still meet the state’s rules around how many hours students must be in school by having longer school days.
District officials whose schools operate on a four-day week say it’s one way they can try to attract and retain teachers when they can’t afford to pay them a competitive salary. In some cases, the shift to a four-day week is driven by community needs.
The Colorado Sun on Thursday is publishing a previously recorded panel discussion that unpacks how a four-day school week works and whether it has paid off for districts in their efforts to staff classrooms and set their students up to excel. Here’s a preview of some of the major questions we discussed.
Why do districts make the move to four days?
Shorter school weeks have evolved into the norm in rural Colorado, where districts compress learning into four days with up to about two extra hours per day.
Alamosa School District, a district of just under 2,000 students in the San Luis Valley, is now in its third year of a four-day week after becoming the region’s last district to make the switch.
“We saw it coming as a tsunami that wasn’t going to be stopped,” said Luis Murillo, assistant superintendent, who devoted a year to studying how four-day weeks played out in other districts and getting feedback from the community before the change.
Murillo said the district faced pressure from the local teachers union to adopt a four-day schedule to improve the mental health of educators after the pandemic. The district had also lost teachers to other area districts with a four-day school week.
Alamosa School District’s students now attend school 148 days, with middle and high schoolers in school from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and elementary school students attending from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., Murillo said, acknowledging learning time is tight. The district also starts school earlier in August than other districts.
After the district embraced a four-day week, the city of Alamosa followed, condensing the work week into four days for some of the same reasons, a decision that has created a “healthier” community, he said.
About 140 miles northeast of Alamosa, Cañon City School District abides by its own modified schedule, alternating every week between four days and five days.
“We were just trying to stay competitive, but we didn’t want to go to four and that’s a really important part of the story,” Superintendent Adam Hartman said. “District leadership values education, believes in school, that it’s a good thing and if it’s a good thing, we want to provide more of it.”
The hybrid schedule, now in its eighth year, represented something of a compromise for the district of 3,082 students. It gave the district a new tool to compete for top teachers and also communicated to families that the district was listening to their request for a different schedule, Hartman said, without scaling back on days as dramatically. It also inched the district closer to Fremont County’s four-day work week.
Kids in Cañon City now show up to school 161 days, down from 174.
“I understand why communities have been put in a position of looking at the four day and going that way and that it’s a local decision that has a lot of variables, including money,” Hartman said. “When money becomes more scarce, time becomes a commodity.”
Do four-day weeks impact how well kids learn?
It’s hard to draw a direct line between how much time kids spend in school and how well they perform, education experts say, but data suggests that students enrolled in districts with a five-day routine make greater gains than kids going to school four days every week.
“It seems obvious, but there have been questions around seat time and learning, said Van Schoales, senior policy director of the Keystone Policy Center, “and there’s a lot of variation on it, but on average the more kids are in school, the more that they’re learning.”
After analyzing state data, the Keystone Policy Center determined in a 2024 report that students in five-day districts made more progress in trying to meet state academic standards than kids in four-day districts. At the same time, a higher percentage of students in districts on five-day weeks proved to be proficient in math and English language arts on state standardized tests known as the Colorado Measures of Academic Success.
And a larger percentage of districts with five-day schedules were rated highly on Colorado’s District Performance Framework, which measures how well districts are educating their students.
Murillo, in Alamosa, said the academic growth the district saw early on after adopting a four-day schedule has since slowed.
“What this is guiding us to do is to be hyperfocused, very protective of our instructional time so we can continue our positive trajectory,” Murillo said, particularly since some of that time gets eaten up by school traditions like pep rallies and holiday celebrations.
“We have to be very intentional and surgical about what we’re teaching with the amount of time that we have,” he said.
But the learning doesn’t abruptly stop once students close their textbooks for the week every Thursday afternoon. The district partners with outside organizations, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of the San Luis Valley, to pull off Friday programs that thrust more than 300 students into all kinds of new experiences, Murillo said.
Kids learn how to ski, how to swim and paddleboard and how to ride and fix bikes. They also get schooled on outdoor safety, including by visiting the Great Sand Dunes National Park and by climbing Blanca Peak, which reaches more than 14,000 feet.
The amount of time kids spend in school is one of many factors that influence whether they master their classes or struggle, Murillo said.
Schoales suggests districts focus most of their attention on how they’re using their hours of instruction.
“Being reflective around what’s the best way to support kids and their learning, you should begin with that rather than do things because we’re used to doing them a particular way, whether it’s four-day or five-day (weeks),” he said.
Do four-day weeks actually attract and retain teachers?
The migration to a four-day week as a way to draw educators and keep them hasn’t panned out across all districts. Teacher turnover has continued to challenge districts, including those on a four-day schedule, according to the Keystone Policy Center report. Among its findings was a higher average teacher turnover rate in four-day districts than in five-day districts from 2018-19 through 2022-23.
In both Alamosa and Cañon City, however, district officials say shifting away from the traditional five-day school week has incentivized staff.
“One of our goals was to be competitive to get great people in our classrooms and in all of our positions,” said Hartman, of Cañon City School District. “And we thought especially in Fremont County, where we have wonderful outdoor recreation opportunities, beautiful weather, this would be attractive.”
Hartman said the district’s pool of applicants has been full of quality teacher candidates and the district’s alternating schedule of four days and five days has piqued the interest of educators about to start their career.
“It strikes that balance,” Hartman said, offering educators a break every other week.
Alamosa teachers, meanwhile, have reported better mental health since the district’s shift to a four-day week, with a full weekend and an extra day to take care of responsibilities at home, according to Murillo.
Qualman, of Eagle County School District, isn’t convinced a four-day school week is the best way to attract top talent. Qualman said he understands why districts have cut down on the number of days they’re in school as they grapple with budget pressures and teacher shortages.
He called four-day school weeks “a necessary byproduct of an underfunded system.”
“There are so few variables that our districts can modify within the tight constraints that we face with the state budgeting situation that one of the few that they can adjust is time,” Qualman said. “So when they don’t have money to provide raises or competitive compensation for their staff, they can try to entice people to come by making them work less.”
But as the majority of districts have moved over to a four-day week, a shorter week may not be as appealing as it once was, he said.
“Now that 73% of the districts in the state do it, I think in terms of a recruiting tool, it has less power,” Qualman said.
He proposes turning to taxpayers for a potential solution through a statewide ballot measure that would ask voters to allow the state to keep money above limits imposed by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. The additional funding would flow through the school funding formula and would reward districts that added more days to their school calendar, he said.
“You then incentivize those schools that have the least number of days to stay in longer,” Qualman said. “It’s an incentive for those who are furthest behind to add more and then they have the biggest room for potential revenue growth and can start to have more power to recruit.”