PASSAGE 2: School Schedule
By Mark Smith
School districts across the United States are experimenting with different schedules. One experiment is the four-day school week: students attend school four days a week with each day lasting around eight hours. Typically, the prime motivation for trying the schedule is to save money.
In her June 2010 article for The Associated Press, Dorie Turner profiled a school district which switched to a four-day schedule while facing a one-million-dollar budget deficit. The modification saved about $400,000 per year and enabled the school district to avoid firing about 40 teachers. The four-day schedule reportedly creates other benefits: a rise in test scores, increased attendance of students and teachers, and a higher graduation rate. In addition, students can use the extra day for sports and other extracurricular activities without sacrificing class time.
The four-day schedule also provides students and teachers more relaxation time. “Teachers tell me they are much more focused because they’ve had time to prepare,” Superintendent Susan Clark told Turner. “They don’t have kids sleeping in class on Tuesday.”
Sometimes, the four-day school week is deemed a failure. A school district in Marlow, Oklahoma switched back to a five-day school week. “It was harder on the teachers,” Superintendent Bennie Newton told Turner. “We were asking the kids to move at a quicker pace.”
The Macomb Public School District in Oklahoma also switched back to the five-day school week after students showed no improvement in performance. During a 2015 interview with Tulsa World reporters, Superintendent Matthew Riggs cited another reason to prefer the five-day schedule: about 76% of the students in the district live in households that qualify for free or reduced-rate school meals. “There were kids I firmly believe were leaving school on Thursday and weren’t getting a good meal until Monday morning when we served breakfast again,” Riggs told the reporters.
What about the four-day school week cost savings? Paul Hill noted that professional salaries account for the “lion’s share” of school district costs in his July 2017 article for the Education Week website. “All teachers and most professional staff get the same annual pay for the four longer days,” Hill said.
The obsolete purpose of the traditional school calendar with its extended summer vacation was to allow children to help harvest crops. Year-round schooling is another school schedule experiment. One popular year-round schedule has students attending school for 45 days followed by a three-week vacation. This cycle continues throughout the year with adjustments for important holidays.
Some schools try the year-round schedule to save money. Yet year-round schools can cost more money due to expenses such as extra transportation costs and summertime air-conditioning. Another reason that a school switches to a year-round schedule is to prevent summer break learning loss. David Hornak, Superintendent of Holt Public Schools in Michigan, explained this phenomenon to Erin Barry for his August 2016 CNBC article. “On average,” Hornak said, “a teacher on the traditional calendar is required to re-teach between four and eight weeks annually after the summer intermission.”
Read the following excerpt from Passage 2.
What about the four-day school week cost savings? Paul Hill noted that professional salaries account for the “lion’s share” of school district costs in his July 2017 article for the Education Week website. “All teachers and most professional staff get the same annual pay for the four longer days,” Hill said.
What is the BEST meaning of the phrase “lion’s share” as it is used in the excerpt above?
Acausing harm; dangerous
Bmost expensive; costly endeavor
Clargest part of something; major portion
Dmost effective; causing change