The future of four-day weeks

By Olivia Morrison ‘24

Graphic by Sophia Hu ‘26

Catlin Gabel School (CGS) students trudge around campus, sleep-deprived and drowning in homework, walking to their fifth class in a row. It’s a dreaded 4-day week, in which the schedule includes six classes on Monday and five on Tuesday through Thursday.

Although the school has only gone through two iterations of this schedule thus far, it has stirred up much controversy with faculty and students complaining about the pressures that come from such a compressed schedule.

“I do not like the 4-day week schedule very much,” says senior Ava Austria, voicing her beliefs that resonate with many students around campus.

Austria has a demanding schedule, and the 4-day weeks mean that she has the same amount or more homework but just less time to do it. She describes how difficult it is when she has multiple essays, labs, or projects to juggle in multiple classes.

Austria adds, “I probably get less sleep on 4-day weeks because of the amount of homework I do every night, especially with extracurricular activities. It's a little hard to balance that.”

Ginia King, an English teacher at CGS, notes the effects that these weeks have on students. “I have not had a student who has not said it feels burdensome to them…and unworkable.”

King notes how students come to class during 4-day weeks noticeably more fatigued and anxious. “Our class time is so precious,” she continues, stating that it can be detrimental to class time if students are not completely on board.

These effects aren’t only apparent with students. Faculty too, deal with higher workloads during the 4-day weeks, and King reports higher levels of stress. Teachers have to prepare for more classes than usual and spend more time in class, which is exhausting in the same way that it is for students.

On top of that, teachers also need to attend a planning day after the 4-day week, a meeting that is very important to be present for. “It’s not exactly moral boosting,” King concludes.

Despite all of this backlash it’s receiving, the intention behind the schedule design was good. The schedule makes room for important teacher planning days, in which the faculty participates in meetings that focus on equity work and cultural competency.

“The desire is to have in-depth professional learning for employees so that they can serve our students well. In order to do professional learning well, you can’t do it in tiny little bursts, you have to do some immersive work,” explains Head of the Upper School Aline Garcia-Rubio.

Kama Bruce, the Assistant Head of the School and the person in charge of calendar planning, says that preparing adults in the CGS community to be able to convey the school's mission and values to the students is integral. “If something is really important you need to make time for it,” he adds.

He explains that old iterations of the schedule didn’t provide the time that is necessary for effective learning. Professional learning for teachers used to take place after school on Wednesdays, which posed some issues with teachers feeling tired and distracted. Bruce says that teachers weren’t given the time to “cognitively switch off from the idea of teaching and engaging the students deeply and then moving into their own learning.”

So, the solution was to take 4 Fridays throughout the year and do professional development during those times.

Another benefit of the 4-day schedule is that it preserves class instructional time, which, with changes to the schedule and immersive periods, has been dwindling over the years. King explains that class time is vital for preparing students for their future after high school.

“We want to be preparing you all competitively for college, and our means to do that has become more limited,” she states.

Garcia-Rubio also mentions that the schedule was designed to make it the least disruptive for students of all grades. The thinking was that a 4-day week here and there would be less troublesome than random days in the middle of weeks, which creates more choppiness.

“For beginning and lower schoolers, choppiness is disastrous,” she says, explaining how all members of the school were considered in the process.

The days off were also strategically placed around holidays or other off days to create 4-day weekends. Bruce stated that “coming out of the pandemic, we've been seeing a massive shift in attendance at school,” with families often taking extra days off to take extended trips. To mitigate the amount of school missed, the breaks in the calendar were created intentionally.

Garcia-Rubio additionally explains how the homework load was taken into consideration. They chose to have the day with 6 classes on a Monday so students would have enough time to complete that work over the weekend. They also believed that free periods would give enough students breaks during the day.

However, Garcia-Rubio acknowledged that the situation is less than ideal, and they are planning to make changes to it in the future.

“We realized that it didn’t feel good, so for the last week in December what’s gonna happen is that one of the three meetings will be a study hall,” says Garcia-Rubio. This will mean that the workload will hopefully be much easier to manage during these weeks.

When asked if this schedule will be the same next year, she immediately responded no, and Bruce has already begun work on the 2024-25 calendar. Things like the cyclical 7-day schedule, which many upper school students experienced in middle school, are back on the table.

“In many regards, this year is sort of a recalibration year to think about how the schedule plays with the calendar, and we’re going to learn a lot from this year,” says Bruce, emphasizing the importance of getting feedback from students and faculty.

Students and faculty will only need to make it through the rest of the year’s 4-day weeks, and then there will be a new solution.

“I also think you guys are more resilient than you realize,” King laughs. And, she suggests, the schedule may become easier to manage as people get used to it.