Now that the Sweet Home District #55 School Board has decided to institute a four-day school week next year, what’s next?
As a community, we can respond, individually or collectively, in a number of ways: getting mad, giving a collective shoulder shrug and hoping for the best, or we can take steps to make something happen – we can get creative.
Though we, here at The New Era, believed the four-day week was the lesser of two evils – the other being a litany of likely staff layoffs, cuts to nonacademic programs, reduction in services, larger classrooms, reduction of athletics, cuts to music, reducing electives and more furlough days, it still has a lot of potential to be an evil.
For those whose paychecks will be shrunk by this move, it’s going to be tough. That was our biggest concern with the four-day week: the impact on the classified folks. As many of us already know, thanks to reduced incomes due to the economic difficulties we’ve experienced, it’s something we wouldn’t wish on anyone.
But there are other potential difficulties here: the impact on our community’s youngsters – particularly those whose families can’t give them the personal, consistent attention that might be ideal in this situation, due to work demands, family dynamics and other factor.
What happens next will depend on how we, as individuals and as a community, decide we are going to respond.
What the school district and local parents, and others who care about kids in our district, need to do is get together and figure out what potential problems we need to get proactive about. Which youngsters are most at risk in this situation? What are the biggest risks – more mischief due to excessive free time? Educational difficulties due to lack of class time? Substance abuse? Obesity?
If you Google “effects on students of a four-day school week” you’ll see a wide variety of articles that generally boil down to the same conclusion: Four-day weeks seem to harm some students, seem to help others, and appear to have little or no effect on the educational progress of the rest.
The fact is, we want all of the kids in our community, particularly those who come from challenged backgrounds – little support or encouragement at home, lives disrupted by circumstances beyond their control, maybe personalities that easily veer toward bad decisions – to exit our schools ready to successfully take on the challenges of adult life. The fact that classroom activities are not held on Fridays could actually be a positive for many of those kids – as long as we can find a way to keep them active in positive ways.
So what could we do?
Some, of course, could take advantage of the extra-curricular activities offered for older kids by local preschools. The Boys and Girls Club, which, as we reported recently, has instituted behavior requirements modeled on those already in use in our schools, is another option. These cost money, but they’re positive alternatives.
Church youth ministries could assume a role in providing solutions. Instead of, or possibly in addition to, Daily Vacation Bible School in the summers, how about Friday activities throughout the year?
Youth sports programs could hold concentrated skill development for kids on Fridays.
High school and junior high students might also volunteer in some of the activities we’ve mentioned.
Organizations that need volunteers, such as the Beautification Committee, the Parks Commission or the Trails Committee, might be able to put together some programs to give some of our younger generation investment in the community.
The School Board should look into options that might expand work-study opportunities for high school students to volunteer (or work) at local businesses. With the economy the way it is, the volunteer angle might be more workable if it passed muster from state regulators, but it could be a great opportunity for students to gain practical experience and learn the pleasure of productive accomplishment – particularly if they are not used to that.
Activities that convince some reluctant students to even continue school – music, arts, clubs, sports – and even classes could be held, maybe only informally, on Fridays in a productive way if adults who care about kids are willing to devote time to helping them become responsible and productive citizens, which is what a lot of those activities teach. Teachers are still getting paid. What if they, like many of our coaches, used some of that time in productive, non-classroom activities involving kids who suddenly are really interested?
In a sense, we’re taking about an approach similar to the Citizen Conservation Corps, which was a government program that put people to work during the Great Depression. Yes, it was, as government programs tend to be, inefficient and it helped lay the groundwork for some of the Big Government excesses that we complain about in this column on occasion.
But it also taught skills, it built morale and, most of all, it kept young men busy. Each year local CCC “alumni,” most now in their 80s or 90s, gather at Longbow Group Campground, one of the many facilities they built with their own hands, and remember what they accomplished. They’re still proud of it, 70 years later.
Keeping kids busy is going to be important. Now is where the rubber starts to meet the road.
Not having school on Friday could be fatal, or it could be fabulous.
We think Sweet Home is capable of the latter. We’ve got six months to figure this out.