Before his Iowa school district switched to a four-day week, Jayce Moody often wandered away from his kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. Sometimes, he threw things. He was overwhelmed and overstimulated, his mother said.
“It was a huge struggle for him. I mean, we were getting phone calls at 1 o’clock in the afternoon every day saying, ‘Hey, he’s just not ... We can’t do this.’ I was like, ‘OK, we’ll come pick him up. No problem,’” said Madison Wolfe, who lives in Des Moines.
After the schedule switch to one fewer day a week, Jayce, now age 8, did a “180” in terms of his behavior, his mother said. He rarely fled his second-grade classroom last year.
“I noticed a huge, huge change in him as he was able to get that longer break that he needed through the weekend to be able to reset himself, focus on himself. And then Monday morning, we get back to school, and he’s excited to be there. And whereas before, he was dreading it. Monday mornings were like pulling teeth,” Wolfe said.
Jayce has a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and is going to be assessed for autism. Wolfe said her son has improved academically since the Saydel Community School District went to the four-day week. He no longer has to miss school for therapy and other appointments, which are always scheduled on Fridays—the day the district is off from school. Jayce jumped several levels in reading and is proficient in all subjects, she said.
Improved academic and behavioral outcomes—like Jayce’s—are among the arguments in favor of shorter school weeks around the country.
In Iowa, 27 school districts reported that they would be operating on a four-day-a-week school calendar for the 2025-26 school year, according to Heather Doe, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Education. That’s a 50% increase from the 2024-25 school year, when 18 Iowa school districts were on a four-day school week. In 2023-24, just six Iowa school districts operated on a four-day schedule, according to Iowa Department of Education data.
The Iowa districts that adopt this schedule tend to have lower enrollments and higher levels of free and reduced-price lunch participation than the state average, according to publicly available data. Almost all four-day school districts in Iowa are rural. And, many are located in the southern part of the state, where neighboring Missouri has more than 30% of school districts operating on a four-day schedule.
Although the four-day school week schedule is wildly popular with many parents, students, teachers and administrators in some Midwestern states, research has shown the approach can be associated with negative academic outcomes—particularly if the overall number of instructional hours in school is reduced. Others have pushed back against the shorter week, citing not only academic concerns, but worries about child care and students living in poverty or experiencing abuse.
Under Iowa state law, the total number of instructional hours can’t change, no matter how many days of class there are each week. The same is true in Missouri, where roughly one out of every three school districts operates on a four-day week. In Colorado, approximately 60% of school districts are on a four-day-a-week schedule.
The Iowa Department of Education provided The Midwest Newsroom with lists of school districts on a four-day week and other data but did not respond to an emailed request for an interview from The Midwest Newsroom.
Limited data, mixed results
When school district leaders talk to communities about the four-day week, they emphasize the potential positive aspects of the change in meetings and materials, like in this FAQ sheet given to parents in the Anamosa Community School District in eastern Iowa. They provide data from other similar school districts that already made the switch. Sometimes, guests from other districts and even other states are invited to speak and field questions.
Wolfe, the Des Moines mom whose son experienced improved behavior on the four-day schedule, said she felt reassured when Saydel highlighted a similar school district in Texas that had adopted a four-day week and experienced positive outcomes.
School district officials who support the four-day school week model said the approach has been a savior for rural districts that often face a slew of challenges, including threats of consolidation, limited hiring prospects and unfilled teaching jobs, extremely tight budgets and dwindling populations.
“The four-day week is a symptom of other issues,” said Jon Turner, an associate professor at Missouri State University who has researched four-day school calendars for over a decade. Having a four-day school week has, so far, not been something that schools explore when things are going well with hiring and retention and budgets, he said.
The National Council on Teacher Quality in Washington, D.C., a research and policy group, has been vocal about negative outcomes associated with the condensed schedule.
Heather Peske, National Council on Teacher Quality president, said most school districts that switch to the four-day schedule do it for two main reasons: To save money, typically about 1% to 3% of their annual budgets, and to recruit teachers, especially in rural areas where finding instructors qualified to teach certain specialty subjects can be extremely challenging.
Peske told The Midwest Newsroom that research has shown that four-day school weeks are not a fix for teacher turnover, and that students often fall behind in their learning.
“So we really have to ask the question: Is this policy, to reduce school weeks from five to four days, reduce by 20%? Is that a penny-wise, pound-foolish kind of approach?” Peske said.
Much, but not all, of the current research shows negative impacts to student learning correlated with four-day school weeks, she said.
“Students usually pay the price, and learning losses are more common than gains in student learning."
Emily Morton, lead research scientist with the Oregon-based nonprofit NWEA, has studied quantitative effects of four-day weeks and acknowledged discrepancies between research findings and reports from individual schools. Schools tend to tout improved outcomes, while research often paints a different picture.
“It’s pretty confusing and counter to a lot of what we’re seeing in the media,” Morton said in an interview. “Consistently, we’re generally seeing these small, negative effects on achievement.”
Improving students’ academic achievements should not be the motive for switching to the four-day calendar, said James Craig, superintendent of Iowa’s Cardinal Community School District, on the IPR show “Talk of Iowa” on Aug. 21. “That doesn’t make any sense; if you’re going to be in school fewer days, you’re not planning on student achievement being one of the positive things,” Craig said.
And yet, Cardinal saw an increase in rates of students proficient in English and math in 2022-23, the year it began using four-day weeks. The increases exceeded the overall growth in those statistics statewide.
In February 2024, a comprehensive review by the Kansas Department of Education compared the state’s rural districts on four-day schedules and those on five-day schedules. Like Iowa and Missouri, Kansas requires districts to maintain the same number of instructional hours when districts switch to four-day weeks. The report found:
- On average, rural four-day school buildings have significantly more novice teachers and teachers with fewer years of experience overall.
- In general, rural five-day schools are performing better than four-day schools in all four performance areas on state assessments, though the difference is not statistically significant.
- Rural five-day schools are performing significantly better than four-day schools in English, math and science subject areas and the composite on the ACT.
Iowa passed an education reform law in 2013 that permitted districts to deviate from the five-day week as long as they maintained 1,080 hours of school annually. The Waco Independent School District in southeast Iowa began using a four-day week that fall.
The Waco district move came almost a decade before the Iowa Department of Education began collecting data on four-day weeks and more districts began adopting the variation.
The Iowa jump from four districts with shorter weeks in 2022-23 to 27 for the 2025-26 school year coincided with two significant events: the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many parents kept working remotely at least part of the time, and the adoption of education savings accounts. Funded by Iowa taxpayers, ESAs—also called vouchers—allow families to apply about $8,000 to tuition at the school of their choice.
The most recent Iowa School Performance Profile data covers the 2023-24 school year; information about academic performance for 2024-25 is expected to be released this fall. Publicly available academic data can be found on the state’s Iowa School Performance Profiles website, where anyone can search by individual school or by school district.
A spokeswoman for Iowa Sen. Amy Sinclair, a Republican from Allerton, said the senator is working to collect the most recent data resulting from the four-day school weeks and is reviewing the results. Sinclair is the former chair of the Senate education committee and has previously expressed interest in the four-day school outcomes.
Peske, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said a shorter school week can cause losses beyond test scores. A four-day school week means there is one fewer day when students have access to P.E., art and music.
“Having access to the arts and having P.E. certainly contributes to students’ physical and mental health and enjoyment, as well as is a huge contributor to their learning,” Peske said.
The Saydel Community School District, in a mostly unincorporated area of Polk County, is a small district sandwiched between Des Moines and Ankeny. For central Iowa, it is a high-poverty district. Only the Des Moines school district has a greater percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches.
During the 2024-25 school year, Saydel slowly rolled out a four-day school week. Superintendent Todd Martin told The Midwest Newsroom in 2024 that the district did it mainly for the mental health benefits of everyone.
“It’s really about the wellness of not just our staff, but our kids and our community and our families, being able to ensure that kids have time for recovery from an emotional standpoint, to teachers being more fully ready to be at their very best for the four days that they are here, and then to get time for a teacher to plan, and prep, and learn, so that they can be at the top of their game; to give families more time as a family to spend together,” Martin told The Midwest Newsroom in November.
Molly Fritz is a master teacher at Cornell Elementary in the Saydel Community School District. She said Saydel teachers are zeroed in on academic outcomes and continue to watch data closely.
Saydel’s academic data “actually went up a ton,” Fritz said.
“We went up 10% district-wide in our ELA proficiency, which is a lot to go up in one year,” she said. ELA is English language arts – reading and writing.
Pushback, drawbacks
Not every school district that explores a new calendar adopts it. In rural southeast Missouri, the Clearwater R-1 district floated the idea in winter 2024 but ran into heavy resistance from families.
Eric Sentell teaches English at Southeast Missouri State University. He and his wife have a 10-year-old son who attends Clearwater. Sentell said he and other parents showed up at school board meetings and a special community meeting to share what they’d found out about the potential academic consequences of a change.
“We just wanted to make our presence known and let our concerns be felt,” he told The Midwest Newsroom.
One community meeting specifically about the calendar was set to last one hour. It lasted three, Sentell said. His and others’ concerns focused on academic consequences, he said: “Are our kids going to learn what they should learn? Are they going to keep up with their peers in five-day schools?”
The matter appeared on a later school board agenda. Most members of the public who spoke there opposed a four-day week, and the school board voted to stay at five days.
“The eight people speaking against it just had very detailed, very thoughtful reasons. It wasn’t just a knee-jerk ‘we don’t like change’ thing,” Sentell said.
Looking closely at research findings from such outlets as the RAND Corp. was key to forming his views, Sentell said. He shared the scholarly research with school board members, some of whom thanked him later, he said.
One of the reasons Clearwater wanted to look into a four-day week was to improve quality of life for low-paid teachers. When it became clear the community opposed the change, Sentell said, “there was a huge willingness and openness to some kind of bond or tax measure to increase teacher pay.” Parents from both sides of the political aisle came together to request a tax increase.
Luke Hertzler is an elementary school librarian in the Washington Community School District in southeast Iowa, which has about 1,700 students, larger than most that have switched to a four-day week. Hertzler said district leaders explored their own switch for about a year before deciding to hold off. Surveys of families showed close to equal numbers in support and against, with another sizable chunk saying they were indifferent.
The school board voted 5-0 in February against going to four days, but board members said they could revisit the idea as soon as this fall for a future year, the Washington Evening Journal newspaper reported.
“I realize that some districts need to transition to a four-day school week, and I would fully support them in that,” Hertzler said. “But I also worry about the negatives, whether that be lack of child care or food insecurity or time spent with [special education] students or English-learner students.”
Washington is also considering changing to a year-round calendar, the Evening Journal reported, which Hertzler said would impair teachers’ ability to make extra money during the summers. A better solution to burnout among educators than changing the calendar, he said, would be for the state to provide additional funding for public schools.
“You can’t pay the bills with the joy of your job,” he said. Calendar shifts are “a Band-Aid to larger problems happening in the state of Iowa with public education.”
One of the groups that could be the most affected by the four-day school week is children living in poverty or experiencing abuse.
“Every teacher knows that some of our kids, the best part of their day is the second they hit that door, and the worst part of their day is when they leave the door to school,” Turner said.
Educators in both Saydel and Martendsdale-St. Marys said that their small, close-knit communities allow staff and teachers to know which children and families likely need supportive services. Fritz, the master teacher at Saydel, said the district has intervention groups set up, and also excellent school social workers.
Many school districts that adopt a four-day week send food home with children for the long weekend. Some schools also have food pantries on-site.
Peske, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said that all students benefit from being in-person with a watchful teacher for five days.
“Teachers are hugely important to students and their learning, and also to their mental health and their sense of belonging and their joy,” Peske said. “And so cutting the school week from five to four days means students have less access to great teachers. And I just think that’s a cost that could be potentially very high and needs to be very carefully considered.”
Teacher recruitment and retention
Turner spent decades as a K-12 educator before he joined Missouri State and started researching four-day weeks. One year, he visited 60 of the 61 four-day districts in Missouri at the time, driving over 4,000 miles. He is considered a sort of shepherd in the four-day school week movement. When administrators have questions, or the Missouri Legislature tries to create laws around it, Turner receives the calls and texts.
Four-days-a-week schedules are permissible in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. A few rural schools have made the switch in Nebraska, and a few dozen in Kansas; the leader in the region, though, is Missouri, where about 190 of the state’s 518 public districts will go four days a week in 2025-26, Turner said.
A spokesperson for the Nebraska Department of Education told The Midwest Newsroom the state does not keep track of the number of districts operating on a four-day school week.
One factor that can push districts toward a calendar change, Turner said, is a neighbor adopting the four-day week. A 2021 research article summarized the dynamic in its title: “Keeping up with the Joneses: District adoption of the 4-day school week in rural Missouri.”
Here’s what happens: One rural district that can’t pay teachers more makes the move to try to stand out. If it works, neighboring districts experience recruiting and retention challenges and adopt four-day weeks themselves, Turner said. In northern Missouri, an additional challenge for schools is that the minimum salary for teachers across the border in Iowa is higher, he said.
The issue mostly flew under the political radar for many Missourians until Independence in suburban Kansas City with over 14,000 students, started moving toward a four-day week. Independence switched its calendar for the 2023-24 school year. District administrators reported that applications from prospective teachers increased. In 2024, Missouri lawmakers passed a law that will require district voters to authorize the calendar in a 2026 election. Smaller districts are exempt from the election rule. A lawsuit from the Independence district is challenging that law, however, saying it is unconstitutional.
Administrators The Midwest Newsroom interviewed in Iowa uniformly said that their hiring and retention problems dissipated after they went to four days a week. But increased adoption might eventually blunt that effect: A working paper released in 2024 by American Institutes of Research scholars showed that in Colorado, where four-day school weeks are common, such schools see negligible effects on recruiting and retention.
Morton, the NWEA researcher, also contributed to the paper about Colorado. She said it can be difficult to isolate the school calendar from other variables that affect such things as where teachers want to work and how students perform on tests.
Changes in morale, behavior
The biggest shock to Saydel educators was how much better student behavior was on the four-day school week, said Fritz, the master teacher.
“Saydel is a low-socioeconomic school. We are used to high-level behaviors, and we dropped over 50% of our behavior calls to the office this year. And I think it’s a combo: Teachers are more patient and calm with that day off, so then that is reflected in kids. Teachers are more planned and prepared, so you’re not as stressed out when you’re dealing with kids, you know, if you aren’t planned and then you’re trying to teach kids, you are also getting stressed, whether you realize it’s coming off to the kids or not,” Fritz said.
A study of high school students in Oklahoma showed that four-day school weeks were associated with a 39% decrease in per-pupil bullying and a 31% reduction in fighting incidents.
William Watson is the superintendent of Martensdale-St. Marys, a rural public school district approximately 30 miles south of Des Moines, with about 550 students.
Last year was its first on a four-days-a-week schedule. Student and staff morale improved dramatically, Watson said.
He said a key factor in considering the switch was staff turnover and attracting new teachers. He described struggling to fill a science teacher position for two years as an example. Still, he was not immediately on board.
“Initially I thought it was crazy, and initially I was against it, but I did say I would look into it,” he said.
Administrators and board members researched experiences and outcomes in other districts. Their main takeaway seemed to be that student performance would not suffer as long as total time in the classroom stayed the same. Surveys of district families showed cautious support for a change that increased as families learned more.
The board approved a 2024-25 calendar with most Mondays off for students and a 7:55 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. schedule Tuesday to Friday. Students attend class on Mondays in holiday-shortened weeks and to make up for severe-weather closings.
Watson said the benefits have been wide-ranging:
- Teachers report they appreciate being off the clock most Mondays and having dedicated professional development time on others.
- The number of disciplinary referrals at the secondary school plummeted 75%.
- The district saved about $15,000 on busing and substitute teachers.
- Some older students take college classes, work at their jobs or sleep in on Mondays.
- Choosing Mondays off instead of Fridays makes for a cleaner calendar and can reshape how families experience weekends, Watson said: “The one thing we have heard is they can now use Sunday as a day to spend as a family, rather than feel like they have to go through the rat race of preparing for the school week.”
Services to account for the difference from a five-day week include sending food home with children on Fridays and offering child care.
Watson said after the schedule change, more students are open-enrolling into Martensdale-St. Marys.
“We are a public school of choice,” Watson said. “It changed our culture. People smile in our building.”
Although he’s now a convert, Watson acknowledged that a four-day school week “doesn’t work everywhere.”
The child care question
In the Saydel school district, the day is 35 minutes longer than it was under the five-days-a-week calendar. It offers child care on Fridays through its Eagles Nest program, which is designed for children through the age of 10. Fritz said there has not been a high demand for the service.
Turner, the Missouri State professor who studies alternate calendars, said that while it’s important for districts to have services available to help families transition to their kids not being at school once a week, most families adapt within a few months.
“Even if the child care is free on the fifth day, families just figure it out and they stop showing up,” he said. “The kids just stop showing up by Thanksgiving, and I can think of dozens of examples of that.”
The change is more difficult with younger children who need supervision and are less likely to be part of time-intensive out-of-school activities. For older kids, Turner said, school buildings are often buzzing during the weekday off school: Theater kids are building sets, bands are practicing. Rural schools often have hours-long bus trips for sports and activities that can be soaked up on the off day instead of missing class time.
Wolfe, the Saydel mother who said her son’s behavior improved considerably after the four-day week came into effect, said she works full-time at B-Bop’s, a local fast food restaurant. She can’t afford to send her son to the Eagles Nest child care program provided by the school district on Fridays. She has a split custody arrangement. Typically, she has been able to get Fridays off from work. Both sets of grandparents are also involved in his care on Fridays.
The mother and son enjoy the extra time together.
“We go to his appointments, we go to breakfast, we hang out. If it’s nice out, we’ll go to the park, watch a movie, do whatever you need to just reset both of ourselves, and then we’re both rested and ready to go for the week,” Wolfe said.
