By Rachel Walker
Of the many variables and changes to schools within Boulder Valley School District since August, one thing has remained constant: a four-day school week. Students have contact with their teachers (remotely or in-person when schools were open) Tuesday through Friday; Mondays are “professional development” days, where there is no student contact and students are supposed to do independent work.
My elementary school-age kids have “Maker Monday,” an offline activity that often includes building something and draws on kids’ problem solving and engineering capabilities. While I understand the value of tactile activities like this (and promote them in my family’s free time), Maker Mondays are not an adequate substitute for a full academic day where kids engage with the curriculum, teachers, and fellow students.
BVSD officials originally justified the four-day school week in August by saying that teachers and principals required an extra full day of planning each week to adapt to the unprecedented situation created by the pandemic. To me, that made sense. After all, teachers needed to learn how to use technology to pivot to online learning.
They needed to create systems for communicating, monitoring student learning and growth, and managing virtual classrooms. In addition, district officials also touted extensive training opportunities that would take place on Mondays and would enhance the online learning experience. (None of these training sessions were mandatory, and I’ve been unable to get participation rates from the district.)
Certainly an extra planning day each week has been helpful to educators. The principal at my school tells me that many teachers couldn’t maintain their workload without Mondays to meet and plan.
In fact, no-school Mondays now seems sacrosanct, and to question the schedule is to risk being accused of wanting to undermine teachers. When I asked Superintendent Rob Anderson about the future of Mondays, he restated my question to clarify that I was advocating to “reduce planning time for teachers,” which sounds like an attempt to deprive teachers of something we all cherish: time.
But what about the loss of kids’ classroom time? What about the time that parents must sacrifice from their jobs and their daily tasks to supervise children on Mondays? What about the academic time that is being lost and contributing to documented academic slide?
The State of Colorado mandates that public schools are in session for a minimum of 160 “student contact” days. It is unclear to me if the district currently counts Mondays as in-person. Given the lack of student/teacher contact, it seems as though those days should not count toward the state’s requirement.
This is not to minimize the challenges teachers face. Indeed, this has been a hellishly challenging year for everyone. It made sense to build in an extra day of planning each week back in August so that educators could adjust to these difficult circumstances.
Now that school has been in session for almost five months and teachers have developed competence and expertise with the technology, might we return to a traditional school week?
This would create a more consistent schedule for students and ensure adequate time to cover the curriculum. It would ensure we meet state-mandated student contact days and would also reduce the burden on parents. It has been well documented that the pandemic has forced thousands of caregivers, many of them women, out of the workforce as they’ve quit jobs to care for their kids and, often, supervise remote learning.
Not everyone agrees with me. Some parents love having Mondays free to ski and hike and play. Others have created rigorous homeschool tasks for Mondays. Still others say their kids have plenty of school work on Mondays and do not want more screen time in the school week.
These all sound like personal preferences. I would argue that now is the time to set personal preferences aside and return to BVSD’s traditional schedule.
January marks the start of a new semester and almost six months of online learning. It is a natural time to return to the five-day school week.
So please, BVSD and individual school leaders: bring back the five-day school week for consistency, academic rigor, and to take some of the burden off of parents, who have been loyal, steady partners to our public schools since the pandemic began.
Rachel Walker is a writer and parent of two elementary school-age kids in Boulder.
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December 15, 2020 at 06:01AM
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Guest opinion: Rachel Walker: BVSD, Please restore the five-day school week - Boulder Daily Camera
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