At Pahrump Valley High School, there is a five-day school week with alternating days such as on Mondays you would go to all eight of your classes and a block schedule for the rest of the week. The rest of the week is a block schedule: on Tuesdays and Thursdays (block A/ odd days), you would go to your 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th period classes. On Wednesdays and Fridays (block B/even days), you would go to 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 8th-period classes. This schedule can be very confusing to many new students when they start at PVHS.
As of July 2024, in 25 states over 2,100 public schools have switched to doing a four-day school week instead of the usual five. Those schools have the hope to recruit more teachers, boost student attendance, and start saving more money. The idea of a shorter work schedule would put less stress on both the students and the employees throughout the week. Teachers would have an extra day to prepare lesson plans, assignments, projects, etc. Students would be less stressed, they would have more rest between school weeks and more time to get work done. There has been a severe teacher shortage as of 2020 due to COVID-19, which spread to almost every public school in America. Schools that did a four-day school week saw a spike in job applications for not only teacher positions but other jobs as well. Dale Herl, superintendent of the Independence, Missouri school district, told CBS News, “The number of teacher applications that we’ve received has gone up more than 4-folds.”
An analysis of students has been done in six states, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The analysis found that students who went to school for a four-day school week had made an uneven amount of progress. As a whole, they made less progress with reading than they did as students who went for a five-day school week, but even more progress with math and science than the other group of students. As of this year at PVHS, so many Mondays have been off that a switch to a four-day school week won’t be that difficult.
At PHVS many believe that a four-day school week would be more beneficial than the normal schedule that is already in place. “I think they should get rid of the Monday schedule entirely, it’s so hard to get something done for just one of my classes with only 40 minutes” Junior at PVHS, Ana Mateos has stated. Many students at PVHS don’t even show up for an entire week and tend to miss at least one day of every week making school attendance scarce. School has seemed to become more tiresome as the years go by and more and more students have started sleeping in class. A four-day school week would benefit students by allowing more time to get more sleep which is needed.
At Johns Hopkins Medicine, they stated that teenagers need at least 9 to 10 hours of sleep and that’s just something that isn’t happening, but if PVHS were to switch to a four-day school week students would receive that extra sleep they need. A shorter week could help students improve with their studies and attendance, they’d have more time to rest and more time to get school work completed. Mr. Atom Hoffman, a teacher at PHVS has said “I believe a 4-day school week offers significant benefits for both teachers and students. It improves well-being by giving everyone more time to recharge, reduces burnout, and allows teachers to focus on planning and professional development.” It may be a difficult adjustment, but it might be worth it. PVHS switching to a shorter school week could help with a handful of issues and is something that should be looked into not only for PHVS but also for all schools in the Nye County school district.
