A school board in Florida is shaking things up by introducing four-day weekends to the school calendar in a bid to tackle absenteeism.
On Tuesday, the Pasco County School board members unanimously agreed to add three of these “mini-breaks” in October, February and April for the 2024-2025 academic year.
The board hopes students will use these scheduled breaks for their holidays instead of missing regular school days.
Assistant superintendent Kevin Shibley said: “We are hoping that by placing those four-day weekends strategically, we can encourage our students and families to take their trips or vacations on those long weekends instead of taking off instructional days.”
Currently, the district’s absence rates average at five percent, with some pupils missing at least 10 percent of school days.
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In September, Pasco County launched an Absentee Awareness Month to urge parents to make school attendance a priority, highlighting that a 10 percent or higher absentee rate can steer a child towards future crime and unemployment.”
The district plans to scrap four half-days and replace them with a training day for teachers. The board is also keeping the schedule flexible for potential hurricane makeup days.
The school board members believe the main cause of students missing school is parents taking them out for family holidays. They’ve chosen to have “mini-breaks” during times when families usually take their kids out of school.
“It is different, but we’re going to try something new, right?” said board chairman Megan Harding.
Despite introducing four-day weekends, the school board maintains that the new calendar actually offers more teaching time than the current year.
A report from Attendance Works, a charity tackling declining attendance in US schools, found that 66 percent of enrolled students attended a school with high or extreme levels of chronic absence in 2021-2022.
This means “at least one of five students in their school was missing almost four weeks throughout the school year.”
The data also revealed nearly 14.7 million students were regularly absent in the 2021-22 school year. That’s a whopping increase of 6.5 million more students missing 10 percent or more of regular school sessions compared to the year before the pandemic.
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