As a sixth grader, I was absolutely ecstatic to hear the rumor that my school would be switching to a four-day school week. By the fall of 2018, my hopes were actualized, and both school districts in my city transitioned to a Monday-through-Thursday schedule. While many students celebrated the fact that they would now be spending fewer hours in the classroom, this decision came after years of ongoing financial strain on School Districts 60 and 70 in Pueblo, Colorado, an urban city in southern Colorado.
Given that local funding for public schools is collected via property taxes, low-income communities like Pueblo have consistently faced budget deficits. The choice to remove one day of school every week appeared to be a financially logical one that would cut costs for buses, lunches, staff payroll, electricity, and more. Pueblo School District 60 claimed at the time that the decision would save approximately $1.4 million. Importantly, the decision to change the public school schedule coincided with unrest amongst the underpaid and overworked teachers of Pueblo. In addition to funding concerns, the struggles with teacher and staff retention provided yet another reason to make the switch. Since then, many other schools across Colorado have transitioned to the shortened school week. During the 2022–2023 school year, 64 percent (119 of 185) of Colorado’s districts were primarily composed of schools with four-day school weeks. While this choice, on paper, may seem beneficial for these districts, I certainly experienced its shortcomings as a student in Pueblo. Especially in cities like Pueblo, this four-day schedule causes more harm than good—straining lower-income families, hindering students’ education and academic achievements, and mounting pressure on teachers and staff.
The particular economic context of Pueblo has caused the four-day school week to disproportionately impact lower-income families. While some studies have sought to minimize the impact of the four-day school week by arguing that it is primarily limited to rural areas with low populations, Pueblo does not follow this trend. Pueblo Districts 60 and 70 serve a combined total of about 25,211 students, and in District 60, 59.2 percent of the total student population is considered economically disadvantaged, with some high schools reporting rates as high as 83 percent. As a result, thousands of students rely on free breakfasts and lunches provided by public schools. In 2018, countless families were blindsided when they discovered that they would lose access to two free meals a week under the new four-day schedule. For a lower-income community like Pueblo, even these seemingly minor cuts can have massive impacts. Given the recent United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funding cuts that have harmed food banks, low-income families count on the public school system to help fill the gaps. Equally troubling, the four-day school week also creates greater childcare needs. For households where parents work full-time, it can be challenging to find and access affordable childcare on Fridays. Out of Colorado’s 10 most populous counties, Pueblo ranks the worst, with 0.29 childcare seats available per child under six. As a result, many families who cannot find or afford childcare are forced to leave their young children unattended.
Inside the classroom, the four-day school week is detrimental to students. Out of the handful of students at my high school eligible to take Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry during my junior year, not a single student scored above a three—the cutoff for a passing score. It is certainly not that every student in my class simply did not study enough. Instead, by the time we had to take the exam, my class still had not covered about 1.5 units of the standardized nine-unit curriculum. This is unfortunately the reality for many students in those districts that have no choice but to resort to a four-day school week. Standardized tests, such as AP or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams, proved especially difficult for Pueblo schools, which had minimal time to teach the supposedly standardized curriculum. Similarly, Pueblo students tend to struggle with the SAT, with the average score for an 11th grader in District 60 for the 2024–2025 school year being 869 (as compared to Colorado’s state average of 998).
Admittedly, there are likely many factors that contribute to this problem—from low funding to a lack of qualified teachers—but the shortened time in the classroom certainly exacerbates the issue. With students losing countless hours of active, engaged learning, significant gaps in curriculum and knowledge are almost inevitable. These low test scores often preclude students from applying to more selective, elite universities and scholarships. For example—although several thousand students attend Pueblo high schools—no one from my city had been accepted into a top-20 institution for several years before I was accepted to Brown. The few students who can do so, including myself, often come from privileged backgrounds that allow them to independently study and learn the material. For most, access to the time and resources required to do so is not available. The four-day school week holds Pueblo students back, even after graduation. The smaller portion of students at my high school who were able to attend a four-year university are often forced to play catch-up with their peers, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) coursework, where more rigid, linear course progressions are upheld. The four-day school week in Pueblo creates structural barriers that ultimately make higher education even less attainable for an already struggling low-income community.
Unfortunately, the burden to mitigate these issues often falls on many of the exhausted teachers of Pueblo. Low student performance records and proficiency rates, especially in math and science, are often used as calls to motivate teachers to improve the quality of student education. In reality, however, there is very little that teachers can do with the truncated schedule. One of my IB teachers in high school would often break down hours available to us in the school year—making necessary subtractions for the four-day week, assemblies, holidays, snow days, etc.—to illustrate that it was physically impossible for our class to finish the curriculum at the same time as most other high schools teaching the same course. As other schools would be wrapping up the curriculum and beginning several weeks of intensive review before the exam, my teacher explained, our class would still be in the midst of the last few units. While many of my teachers did their absolute best to prepare us for standardized exams and college coursework, there was only so much they could do.
Across Colorado, teachers are already burdened, overworked, and underpaid, so placing the additional responsibility of trying to fill the gaps on them is simply unfair. In my high school, many teachers would use Fridays as a chance to catch up on grading, plan lessons, write exams, and generally prepare for the upcoming week. Recognizing that my class was not going to finish the curriculum in time for the AP exam, my very dedicated AP Chemistry teacher offered optional, shorter lessons for students on Fridays in order to cover at least some of the later units. While it was very generous of her to do so, we should not expect teachers to offer up more of their own time, especially in districts where they are not paid to do so. The public school system is already failing teachers as is, and the four-day school week adds even more burdens to an already taxing profession.
By cutting back access to childcare and free meals for low-income families, and limiting students’ academic achievement while burdening teachers, the four-day school week has been detrimental to Pueblo, Colorado. While financing issues have always—and will remain—relevant to both school districts, especially given that Pueblo is a low-income community that funds public schools via property tax, it seems that the shortened schedule is far from an ideal solution. Ultimately, the harm to families, students, and teachers can hardly be justified by financial savings, especially in the case of Pueblo School District 60, where the amount claimed to be saved represents less than 1 percent of the district’s total operating budget. In a community where only about 25 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, Pueblo needs to do much more for its education system. With more than 13,000 school districts nationwide having schools that operate on a shortened schedule, Pueblo offers a case study that demonstrates the many weaknesses of the truncated schedule.