BHCSD #4 hears proposal for four-day school week

Superintendent Keith Campbell presented Big Horn County School District No. 4 with the idea of a four-day school week at their Dec. 9 board meeting. 

“I think it’s a perk,” Chair Heath Hopkin said. 

Across Wyoming, 26 districts – over half of the state’s schools– follow a four-day week schedule. Nearby, Meeteetse and Thermopolis do so. 

To make the change, BHCSD #4 would have to ask the state for an exemption on their daily requirement and instead adhere to an hourly requirement. The minimum annual pupil-teacher contact time for Wyoming public schools is 450 hours for kindergarten, 900 hours for elementary, 950 hours for middle school and 1,000 hours for high school. The district would have to submit an alternative schedule application to the State Board of Education between Jan. 1 and April 1 preceding the school calendar year for which the schedule would be implemented. 

Basin’s school board did not indicate whether they would look to make the change for next school year. Before any further action is taken, Campbell is set to send out a survey to stakeholders, including parents and teachers, and bring results back to the board. 

There are several ways the shift could appear. Campbell shared that during his time as a superintendent in Miles City, Mont., the switch to a four-day week schedule tacked about a half hour of instructional time onto each remaining school day. 

 “Sometimes school districts provide daycare on that Friday; sometimes that’s what they do with their paras who are used to working those five days a week. Sometimes you expand your rec and your after-school programs; our Beyond the Bell program, which is federally funded,” Campbell said to the school board. 

Potential benefits could include teacher attraction and retention, more prep time for teachers and less absenteeism. Currently, sports and extracurriculars frequently take away a large portion of the student body on Fridays regardless. 

“A lot of people go at it for cost savings, but I’ve talked to several of them. There’s little to no cost savings,” Business Manager Trevor Whitaker said. Campbell estimated between 0.4-0.5% savings. 

Concerns would include Laura Irwin Elementary parents having to source daycare and provide food services on Friday, which Campbell explained many schools assist with. There is not substantial evidence that a four-day school week helps or hurts test scores. 

“I’m usually skeptical…,” Vice Chair Greg Gloy said. “But at the same point I understand that’s a big component of teacher recruitment. I also know we have some really great teachers and we do well currently.”

Campbell shared that in Montana, several smaller schools surrounding Miles City changed to a four-day school week and drew away their teachers. Eventually, Miles City had to make the change to compete. 

“The first school to do this in this area will benefit the most,” Campbell predicted, with some teachers already commuting from nearby towns to work. 

LAND SWAP

After investing in a whole new track, field and grandstands at Gibbs Field, the school district hopes to actually own its athletic field, adjacent to their current campus, by trading the Town of Basin for its old Rebel Stadium left on Ninth Street. 

“We’ve built a concessions stand, we built a track, we built bleachers and grandstands, we’re putting lights possibly in the future… there’s a lot of money going into a leased facility,” Campbell said. 

An upside of the district owning Gibbs Field would be state reimbursement for the additional six acres of conjoining educational land. 

Rebel Stadium is roughly half the size of Gibbs Field at three acres. In discussions, the town has suggested they be given the old FFA building, currently used for mechanic projects, which they would then turn into a warming hut, to compensate. 

“That one would cost $200,000 to replace,” Whitaker said. “It would be cheaper for me to build them a warming hut than to trade them that building.”

Campbell suggested just that: the school would purchase a small, prefabricated building for the town as part of the trade. Gloy added that the school’s unused Quonset hut area could potentially be included in bartering if acreage is essential. 

LIE OVERHAUL

“We’re not getting the scores we want to get; we are not the school that we want to be, so in order to do that, we cannot keep doing what we’ve been doing and get better results, we’ve got to make some changes,” Laura Irwin Elementary Principal Katie Seeley addressed the board. 

After LIE received a “Partially Meets” expectations on its Wyoming Department of Education Accountability Report for the second year in a row, Seeley has been working on an improvement plan for the school. This has included participation in a Keys to Literacy education group and 307 Professional Learning Academy. Seeley hoped to update the school’s knowledge on the science of reading and learning components, as well as implement changes to instructional and student engagement strategies. 

“We’re in dire need of a behavior tracking system,” Seeley said. “Staff will tell you behaviors have increased, but they haven’t reported them to me, so our data looks like we haven’t actually had an increase in behaviors.”

The Minga app has been purchased to remedy this and will be implemented in January. 

“The more kind of sense of urgency we have, the more perky pace we have of instruction, that’s going to keep the kids engaged and less idle time. They’re all just interconnected, so it feels like we’re doing a ton of things, but yet they’re connected in some way,” Seeley said. 

OTHER NEWS

The board’s internally elected positions were all refilled by their incumbents: Hopkin as chair, Gloy as vice, Kristin Schlattmann as clerk and Linda Osmond as treasurer. 

Security State Bank was reaffirmed as the district’s depository, Basin Republican Rustler as official news media, Copenhaver, Kitchen & Kolpitcke as school attorney and James Seckman as school auditor. 

Whitaker reported the school’s new concession stand now has sheetrock in. An RFP scoreboard is in the works; a contractor has been hired.