(EDITOR’S NOTE: The four-day school schedule was once an anomaly, restricted to rural schools in Idaho and other Western states. This fall, about 100,000 Idaho’s students will attend a four-day school, and the Nampa School District will be the largest district to adopt the schedule. Idaho EdNews senior reporter Kevin Richert will spend the 2024-25 school year taking an in-depth look at the four-day phenomenon — and how it affects students, taxpayers and communities. Share your comments, questions and story ideas via email: [email protected].)

The Homedale School District adopted a four-day schedule a decade ago, hoping to save some money.

The Post Falls School District went the four-day route a year ago, and didn’t expect to save much money.

In both cases, the move had a negligible effect on the budget. And that’s the norm. There are plenty of unanswered questions about four-day schools — particularly when it comes to student achievement. But when it comes to the impact on the bottom line — or lack thereof — the research is clear.

And as a growing number of Idaho schools shave a day off their weekly calendar, the talking points have evolved. Now, supporters talk about a different set of advantages.

• Recruiting and retaining teachers.
• Improving attendance.
• Giving students and parents an extra day to recharge.

When advocates talk about the four-day schedule, they bring up money only in passing.

“It was never about saving money for us,” Post Falls Superintendent Dena Naccarato said.

A history tied to tough times

Nationally, the first four-day schools surfaced in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.

Other districts dabbled with the move during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Idaho’s four-day school proliferation coincided with the Great Recession.

In the autumn of 2008, only 14 districts and two charters opened the year on a four-day schedule. But during that same fall, financial and stock markets teetered on a knife’s edge, and Idaho schools descended into an unprecedented budget crisis. The state cut K-12 spending for the only time in Idaho’s history. It took seven years for the K-12 budget to finally claw past its 2008-09 level.

And by the autumn of 2015, 44 districts and nine charters were running on a four-day calendar.

To be sure, that didn’t mark the end of the trend. The number of four-day schools has continued to grow dramatically since 2015 — even while the state’s general fund spending on K-12 has increased by nearly 80%. This fall, 76 Idaho districts and 19 charter schools are operating on a four-day calendar.

As the budget has grown, so too has the four-day schools movement.

But in Homedale, tough times and tight budgets forced administrators’ hand.

The Homedale story

In 2013, Homedale voters rejected a school supplemental levy, twice.

Staring at a two-year, $968,200 hole in the budget, the rural Owyhee County district responded by putting all of its options on the table.

Superintendent Rob Sauer ruled out running another supplemental levy, and trying again for the elusive simple majority needed to pass such a levy. With buildings dating back to the 1940s, he instead prioritized a plant facilities levy, and putting property taxes into the aging infrastructure. “We were limited in the ask of our patrons.”

Moving to a four-day calendar would never replace the money from a supplemental levy. But a 2011 study, which predated Sauer’s arrival as superintendent, said a four-day schedule could save up to $70,000 a year.

That never happened.

For one thing, Homedale decided to keep its classified staff whole. Some new four-day districts save money by cutting pay for bus drivers, cafeteria staff and other workers who fill a variety of tasks outside the classroom. In Homedale, those employees are tough enough to find.

“We would have been shooting ourselves in the foot,” Sauer said. “For us to not do our part to treat them well just doesn’t make sense.”

Most of Homedale’s savings came through a reduced need for substitute teachers. As teachers scheduled medical appointments for Fridays, they didn’t need as many weekdays off. But over the first five years on the new schedule, Homedale saved only $36,000 on subs, Sauer said.

The savings have been modest, but Homedale has stuck with the plan it adopted a decade ago. The district has never again run a supplemental levy. A 10-year, $1.5 million plant facilities levy remains on the books; it passed in 2015, during Homedale’s first year on the four-day calendar, with 80% voter support.

And the four-day calendar remains popular in Homedale. Sauer sees it as a way for his rural district to carve out a niche as a school of choice, and recruit and retain good teachers. “It’s important for us to be competitive.”

‘You will not save significant dollars’

The back-of-the-napkin assumption goes like this: If a school district or a charter school shortens the instructional week by a day — by 20% — shouldn’t it save roughly 20%?

It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t even come close.

A school’s biggest expense is arguably its most important investment: teacher salaries and benefits. And in economic jargon, it’s an inelastic expense. A school needs a fairly inflexible number of teachers to fill its classrooms, regardless of the schedule.

So for years, experts have downplayed the potential for financial savings — even during the Great Recession, when cash-starved Idaho schools moved in droves to a four-day calendar.

The Denver-based Education Commission of the States looked into the rising trend in 2011, and “was unable to find any district that moved to a four-day week and reduced either teachers’ pay or benefits.” On top of that, Michael Griffith of the ECS wrote at the time, no district reported a “substantial reduction” in non-classroom staff.

In other words, he wrote, 80% of a school’s budget was basically off the chopping block.

Schools could save some money around the margins, largely by cutting the expenses associated with a fifth day of instruction: heating and cooling bills, bus routes, cafeteria services, substitute teachers. On the high end, a district could cut 5.4% from its budget, Griffith wrote, but in reality, districts that made the move saved only 0.4% to 2.5%.

And in 2024 — weeks before the four-day schools issue overshadowed the debate over a historic $1.5 billion school facilities law — state superintendent Debbie Critchfield minced no words on the financial aspects.

“I do not support districts moving to a four-day week if they are doing it as (a) money-saving move,” Critchfield wrote in a Jan. 29 letter to education stakeholders. “You will not save significant dollars going to four days, as evidenced by the many districts that moved to a four-day week and saw little to no cost savings in the long run.”

Four-day schools stack up financially

Here’s another assumption: Idaho’s four-day schools are uniformly underfunded. This assumption feeds a narrative that Idaho schools move to a four-day schedule — and stay on a schedule — strictly out of economic necessity.

But this assumption doesn’t stand up either. Consider one common funding yardstick: spending per student.

Factoring in state and federal dollars, Idaho districts and charters received $10,246 per pupil in 2023-24.

And among the 90 districts and charters that operated on a four-day schedule, 54 (or 60%) received per-pupil funding above the state average.

Per-pupil spending isn’t a perfect measure, because the numbers can fluctuate wildly from community to community. One big factor is economies of scale. A larger district or charter can spread its costs. A smaller district or charter has the same kind of fixed costs, and fewer students.

In 2023-24, the tiny Three Creek School District received $89,216 per student, the highest rate in the state. But Three Creek — located on the windswept high desert of Twin Falls County, near the Nevada border — had only four students attending its elementary school.

The Oneida School District ranked last in the state in per-pupil spending, at $6,469. But the district’s reach extends far beyond its brick-and-mortar schools in Malad, near the Utah state line. Oneida had more than 8,500 students last year, and most of them attended Oneida’s statewide Idaho Home Learning Academy.

Both Three Creek and Oneida operate on a four-day schedule.

Even small savings are savings

In 2019, when the RAND Corporation studied four-day schools in Idaho, Oklahoma and New Mexico, researchers heard rosy reports about savings. Administrators claimed they had been able to save 4% to 12% with a four-day schedule — or, as RAND said in its 2021 report, “larger savings than the empirical evidence would suggest is possible.”

But RAND researchers also heard a strong and salient anecdotal message.

“Administrators noted that even small savings were meaningful,” the RAND report said. “At least two district administrators reported that as a result of the cost savings attributable to the (four-day school week), they were able to keep instructional staff and avoid laying off teachers and increasing classes sizes.”

Jenifer Wright shared a similar message with state political leaders in March.

During the 2024 legislative session — as lawmakers debated bill language designed to derail the four-day movement — hundreds of Idahoans emailed Critchfield and Gov. Brad Little. The vast majority of the emails extolled the virtues of a four-day schedule — teacher retention, improved student attendance, and a calendar that fits small-town Idaho. They urged political leaders to butt out of local school calendar decisions, and strip anti four-day schools language from the omnibus facilities bill.

Many of the emails came from Eastern Idaho communities with four-day schools — places like Preston, where Wright teaches third grade at Oakwood Elementary School.

Preston adopted the four-day schedule in 2011-12, in the wake of the Great Recession. Preston has been able to cut busing and utility costs and reduce classified staff hours, Wright said, and uses the savings to hire teachers and reduce class sizes.

“I have 23 students in my third-grade classroom, while my friends who are teachers in other districts that are five-day, have closer to 30 or 32,” Wright said in an email to Critchfield, legislators and State Board of Education members.

The Post Falls story

Serving a bedroom community outside Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls doesn’t fit the traditional model of the rural, remote school district. With nearly 5,900 students, it’s one of the largest four-day districts in the state.

That’s why Naccarato went into the scheduling change in 2023, with a specific set of objectives and a clear sense of expectations.

Teacher retention was Naccarato’s primary goal. She wanted to find a way to compete not only with Coeur d’Alene but the nearby Spokane, Wash., metropolitan area, where schools can offer a big pay bump to any educator willing to make the commute over the state line.

Cost savings never entered Post Falls’ discussion — and Naccarato said the district was upfront with patrons about the limited potential for savings.

Some far-flung districts can save a lot of money by reducing bus routes, but Naccarato knew that wasn’t going to happen in the relatively compact 64-square-mile Post Falls district. Post Falls was able to save on substitute teaching costs, by about $57,000 over the first year. In a Panhandle community where winters linger, utility bills also dropped a bit.

Last school year, Post Falls saved about $282,000 from a $65 million budget, Naccarato said. That translates to 0.4% — the low end of the savings range the ECS laid out in its 2011 study.

“We didn’t expect it to save very much money, and it didn’t,” Naccarato said.

The series so far

Sept. 26: A popular unknown: Shortening the school week expands across Idaho

Sept. 26: A deep dive into four-day schools — and researchers found contradictions