Fair Grove Schools has made a big adjustment to its 2019-2020 school year by shifting to a four day week and adding an 8th hour in order to, as principal Chris Stallings states, “separate ourselves from the larger schools.” The idea of this change originated from the school’s superintendent Mike Bell after examining the idea for a few years. Bell proposed the plan to the school board and they agreed to adopt it to the following year’s school calendar. 

A few months into the school year, Stallings had a bit of time to evaluate the changes and has all positive feedback. He reports, “I believe that it has improved the moral and culture of our district.” Not only this, but he also confirms seeing, “students and teachers smiling a lot more when they come in on Tuesday mornings.” 

The students of Fair Grove Schools earn extra time to work on homework, activities, and family time on their Mondays off. Nonetheless, there are bound to be difficulties when making a big change such as removing an entire day from a school schedule. 

The difficulties in particular include struggles within the eighth hour of the school day and the timing of the first lunch. The struggles in the eighth hour consist of students not having school activities to work on and not using their time wisely. In some classes, this resulted in the teachers assigning students with work to keep them busy. 

The students and faculties lunch shift was adjusted to earlier in the day to make room for the eighth hour. However, the added half was a necessity to the administration for the benefit of the students.

Student Esais Baird (9) has a similar constructive opinion on the topic as well. Baird agrees that having the extra day taken from the week is a good trade off from having longer breaks or breaks at all. Since Baird is a freshman he has the longest time to see the progress of the new schedule. He expects, “temporary changes” to come, and possible, “assigned work in the eighth hour” to come in the following years.