Central Texas school district starts first, four-day calendar after local districts report positive results

HILLSBORO, Texas (KWTX) - Hillsboro ISD is starting its first school year with a four-day calendar after Central Texas school districts with four-day schedules reported positive results.

Hillsboro ISD Superintendent Darrell Brown said due to inflation and lack of funding from the state, the district is hoping to increase its staffing and the quality of staffing with the four-day school week calendar.

“The cost of our business is going up and we’re not getting additional funding, so we’ve been put in this position,” he said.

Brown said the district has tried incentives for teachers and made other adjustments, but it did not lead to great results.

“At the end of the day, we just felt like our experience in 2023 was not what we desired,” Brown said.

He said he wants to provide the best quality staff for the students, and, because the district cannot do that with the financial resources it has, he spoke with other districts about the four-day school week option.

Many Central Texas school districts are reporting positive or neutral results among staffing, attendance, academics and morale.

Recruitment and Retention

Teacher recruitment and retention were the main reasons China Spring ISD decided to start the four-day calendar. Going into the new school year, Superintendent Marc Faulkner said each classroom has a teacher.

“We have hired a lot of people that came to our district, strictly for our four-day calendar,” he said.

KWTX reached out to all school districts in our viewing that now have a four-day school week. Of those that responded, we found a majority said they are either fully staffed or had better staffing compared to a five-day schedule school year.

“In comparison to previous years, our staffing is much better for the start of the school year than it has been on a traditional five-day calendar. ,” Connally ISD Director of Communications, Michael Donaldson, said.

Donaldson said the district is not fully staffed with some openings for paraprofessionals and one teacher opening.

The following shows responses from the school districts who have an adjusted calendar in the Central Texas area. These districts responded to our information request.

• Academy ISD: Fully Staffed
• Bynum ISD (Four-and-a-half-day week): Fully Staffed
  • The district did report vacancies last year with the same calendar
• Dew ISD: Fully Staffed before and after change
• Frost ISD: Fully Staffed
• Mildred ISD: Fully Staffed

Attendance

Attendance was another factor in deciding to change the calendar. Connally ISD saw attendance increase by two to three percent.

“That meant that we have kids sitting in the seats, getting direct instruction more often, which helps us out across the board,” Donaldson said.

China Spring ISD said its attendance increased by one percent; however, Faulkner said this goes a long way because schools receive state funding based on their attendance rate.

“We’ve been about a 95% all this time,” he said. “Well, this last year, we were at 96.1. So to me, that’s about $400,000 additional dollars that this district was able to recoup from the state of Texas.”

• Academy ISD: Increased
• Bynum ISD (Four-and-a-half-day week): “not enough change to say that it impacted attendance rate for the good or bad.”
• Dew ISD: Stayed the same; enrollment increased
• Frost ISD: Increase by 2%
• Mildred ISD: Increase by 1%

Academics

For Connally ISD, the shift to the four-day schedule, or ‘intensive intervention calendar,’ was mainly focused on improving academics. The district is open certain Friday’s of the month to provide intensive teaching, help students with attendance or help students work on projects and assignments.

“On an intervention Friday, we have select students who are targeted for additional intervention hours,” Donaldson said. “They can come up to the school for small group, very focused, specific instruction to help them meet their academic goals, make progress towards performance standards on standardized tests.”

“We wanted to be able to provide that small group instruction to help our students that need that additional help to be able to get them to where they need to be in terms of performing on a test or performing in their academic classes.”

Donaldson said standardized tests results revealed neutral test results this year.

“We really saw a neutral position for how our district did overall,” Donaldson said. “That is one of the things that we looked at, and we wanted to find a way to tweak the calendar to better suit the needs to see that academic growth overall.”

He said the district will be tracking specific data points over the year and track student performance.

Academy ISD said its STAAR Test results showed positive changes for its first year as a four-day school calendar.

“Just looking at the star scores that we received at the end of the year, every subject in every grade level, Academy ISD students did better than both the region and the state,” Academy ISD Director of Communications, Jacki Wright, said.

China Spring ISD reported that their assessment results stayed on track.

“It clearly showed that our students are on the same track as they were in previous years,” Faulkner said. “We performed well enough to try that four-day calendar one more time.”

Changes and Obstacles

Many parents were concerned about child care on the day of the week that the district was off.

All school districts said this was not a major issue last school year after the district and community organizations provided childcare options.

China Spring ISD also said it changed its calendar to have more Friday’s off as well to provide more consistency to students and parents.

Results from the past school year may not be directly related to the four-day school week, according to the districts. It will take time, surveys and data to find if the four-day week has a direct impact on staffing, attendance and academics.

However, Hillsboro ISD is joining in on the calendar change.

Brown said he knows there will be an adjustment phase, but he hopes to see improvement over the next year.

He said he has already seen an increase in quality and number of teacher applicants in the spring.

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