Cautions against having a four-day week
Four-day weeks are a contentious topic. The school district is looking to see if a four-day week is possible. More students are in favor of a four-day week, but it also comes with some serious cons. Some students are unaware of the negatives of four-day week, and they might be enough to change the mind of some students. The first, and biggest, is the absence of spring break. This is a big issue for most students, as they use that vacation to go to fun places such as Mexico and Moab. While I see the reasons for wanting a four-day week, I personally would not want to give up that important holiday. If these four-day weeks kept our current schedule without shortening it, then I would be all in.
Another thing that would make people think twice about four-day weeks is the opinion of parents and the surrounding world. Everyone else works on a five-day week. Parents of younger children will not be able to take work off to watch their kids. Some parents might be okay with letting their kids be at home from 7th-8th grade, but that still is not great. And if the high school just had four-day weeks, then we would not have similar schedules to the lower grades.
We would not have spring break while the younger kids did, and we would have way shorter breaks compared to them. Another thing that I shall bring up later is summer break, and how that is even going to be shortened from the requirement to have the same number of days. It is an absolute scheduling nightmare, and just on that alone it would not be possible without severe alterations to the school schedule that are just not possible. With the shortening of weeks, we would also have a shorter summer break. This is hard for the older students who need to save up money for the future, and who want to work as much as possible to achieve that goal. We would also have longer school days, extended by an hour. For students that work after school, this would make that impossible.
More school in the summer would lead to more absences, as students will just skip school to get as much work as possible. A shortened summer break is also just not fun for anyone and messes up schedules that people have for vacations. Overall, a four-day week is just giving up too much of our already short breaks to have just one more day off per week. And don’t we already have a lot of Fridays off?