Would you prefer a 4-Day School Week or keep it 5-Day, take a survey to voice your thoughts
By Garrett Christensen on Thursday, December 22nd, 2022 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
LA GRANDE– The La Grande School District recently launched a community survey regarding the idea of moving the district from a 5-Day School Week to a 4-Day School Week.
Superintendent George Mendoza spoke with Elkhorn Media Group’s Shannon McKone to discuss the survey.
(SM) “Thank you for joining me Superintendent Mendoza, can you tell me how this survey came about?”
(GM) “When I first arrived in our school district, I had students, as well as staff members, asked me about what I thought about the four-day school week.
I came from Morrow County School District, I worked there for seven years. So, I worked in a four-day school. Of course, I did find it to be a great schedule for the adults. In Morrow County folks didn’t always realize that they had a lot of Fridays where they would bring in students to do catch-up type days or contact time so that students could work on any reading or math or school activities that they needed to wrap up.
And I think sometimes people think that a four-day school week is just four days, but the reality is adults continue to work more than students do in terms of being there for support, doing their own work, but also, when students need to come in, they make time for that. So, I indicated at that time, you know, let’s find out.
In negotiations it was brought up about a four-day school week. To me, a work calendar is set by the district or set by the board. And so, it wasn’t a topic that I felt was something for negotiations or anything like that.
It has been brought up numerous times to me and it’s like, well let’s make it a community discussion. Let’s try to find out what parents, what students feel, what staff feel. Let’s figure out what businesses feel, or agencies feel, or what our community feels about it for us.
So, we’re here now. This is my sixth year in the school district, and it’s taken that long to finally get to this type of conversation and this type of work. No decisions have been made; nothing has been done.
If anything, we’re trying really hard to find win-win schedules or win-win solutions. At the end of the day, we have an equity lens that we use in our school district and a major element of that is not making any decisions that create negative or adverse effects to students that are disadvantaged or vulnerable. Even if you’re an above-level student, I don’t want to make any decision that would be adverse to you as well.
So, this is one of those things that we really need to do in a way where we truly understand the implications and ramifications. My perspective has always been that we need to come up with win-win solutions, but really strategies that create more achievement for students.
Everything we need to do, we need to really believe that it’s going to maintain or increase student achievement for all, especially students that are in disadvantaged populations.”
(SM) “So a committee was formed?”
(GM) “Yes.”
(SM) “A survey has been put together?”
(GM) “Yes.”
(SM) “And that is now available for the community?”
(GM) “Yes.”
(SM) “How can the community take the survey and how important is the survey not only for parents and students but the community to take?”
(GM) “Great question. Well, we created a website. So if folks go to La Grande School District, (https://www.lagrandesd.org/) there is a four-day school week website (https://www.lagrandesd.org/page/4-day-week), on there we have lots of resources. We have the survey there. We have our schedules; we have our meeting notes, we have our PowerPoint presentations, we have videos, we even have research out there. So, we’ve tried hard so that if anyone really wants to be educated about our process or educated on the outcomes or the impact of a four-day schedule versus a five-day schedule, we’ve tried to really provide all of that information. That survey has gone out to all our families, we’re also putting it out to social media and our website.
In addition, we’re going to have a town hall meeting in early January. We’re going to have it at the La Grande Middle School. We’re also going to put it on Facebook. We’re really going to try hard to get more than a thousand people to complete the survey. It is in our district newsletter that just came out as well.
We wrote a lot of cool questions in there. Asking about how you are connected to the school district. Are you an employee of the school district or not? Are you a parent or a family member or a community member? All of those types of things. And we’re just going to really try to understand, do you like a five-day school week? How strongly do you like it? Do you like a four-day school week? How strongly do you like it? All the way down to you don’t like it. So, we are really trying to parse out a lot of information.
We’re going to try to hear and understand how students feel, how staff feels about it, how parents feel about it, how community members feel about it, and we’re going to collect all that information, have that survey out for about a month, and then we’re going to work with our four-days school week committee. And we’re going to then review all that information and we’re going to really talk and see what the data is indicating. And from there we will decide if this is something that our community wants, something that our families want, that our students want, that our staff members want, that our businesses can support, or is this something that’s going to create too many problems?
We’re just going to look at all the information and try to make the best decision possible based on the data that we receive. And then, even after that, what kind of four-day schedule, or are we sticking to a five-day?
If we do a four-day, we have 170-day extended year or extended calendar model. Where you would have Fridays off, but students would be in school a little bit more in August. Then working in November and December a little bit more, and then they’re doing a little bit more also in, in June. So that’s an extended calendar four-day.
There is four-days concepts that are 30 minutes longer, so those are extended days, four days. And then there are four days that are 60 minutes longer.
My position has been, even if we do a four day, we better have some programming on Fridays, we better have some things that can support students. There are food needs and then there are learning program needs. And I want to make sure that we have things in place for students so that we can support them and families on Fridays as well. So, I’m trying to make that message really clear.
As mentioned, we will be holding a town hall and then when we have anything that’s at the school. We’re going to have computers out there for folks to be able to take the survey, we will also have printouts of the survey so that folks can do them paper/pencil if necessary so we can get as many people to participate as possible.”
(SM) “Thanks Superintendent Mendoza for all this information. We look forward to following this process and seeing how the community feels.”
