Editorial: Let's move to a Four-Day School Week

Everybody hates coming to school on Monday mornings, but what if we didn’t have to? The school year is made up of 175 days and a few long breaks. You have Christmas break, February break, April break, and if you want to, you can count Thanksgiving break. All of those add up to about 3 ½ weeks and then you have weekends and occasional holidays where you get a day off. You have a summer break in between grades. That is usually 2 ½ months and combined with everything else, that's the whole year. I have a better idea. I first thought of this in Modern World class about 3 weeks ago. The prompt was “ Do you think summer break should be shorter or longer?” We all shared our ideas and I found someone's very interesting. James Underwood proposed that we should have 3 days for the weekend, and that would make a shorter summer break. Here at WUHS, we have 200 days in the school year with 27 days for vacation. Our summer break is about 85 days. If we were to have 3 day weekends, our school year would still have to be 175 days. In our current calendar we have 32 Mondays. We would have all of those Mondays off but we would have to take those 32 days off of our summer break, making the break 53 days rather than 85. We would still start the school year around September 1st but instead of ending on June 9th we would end on July 25th. I think having a four day week and three day weekend opens up a lot more opportunities. If we were to have Monday off, I think it would give the students a day to do homework. On Saturdays it's the first day of the weekend and nobody wants to do anything. Then on Sundays students maybe like to do some work and maybe do some activities. Then finally on Monday, the day we would have off, students could do school work. If we were to make the switch, students would be used to having school on Mondays. Maybe this would motivate students to do some school work on that day, without having to go to school. This could also give teachers an extra day to grade or plan for the week, so that they could spend the weekend with their families. This would also give an opportunity for students and their families to go on a small vacation without missing a day of school. Monday sports events would not require an early dismissal for students. Having a school schedule like this would definitely open up more opportunities for students and families. Do you agree?