MARFA — Marfa schools will continue to operate on the alternative four-day schedule for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year. Trustees voted this week to keep the four-day schedule, which the district adopted this school year, but decided to switch days off to Mondays instead of Fridays.
Interim Superintendent Arturo Alferez said the move to Mondays off should alleviate some issues the district encountered this year, such as school being in session on federal holidays — which typically fall on Mondays. By being back on campus on Fridays, days the district traditionally holds pep rallies ahead of Friday night football games and other sporting events, it also hopes to reinvigorate school spirit, he said.
School board members, a number of whom have kids in the district, expressed approval of having Mondays, rather than Fridays, off. When asked for her opinion about switching to Mondays off, Athletic Director Linda Ojeda said the day off doesn’t matter as much as what is being reinforced at home. She said school staff and parents both need to do their part in encouraging kids to come to school. “It’s not necessarily what’s happening here. It’s what’s not being trained outside of here,” Ojeda said. (District-wide attendance is 92% for this school year to date.)
School will start on August 12, and the first two weeks will be full, five-day weeks, Alferez explained to trustees, to get students back in the routine of coming to school. Full, five-day weeks will also occur before extended breaks for Thanksgiving, Christmas and spring break.
To be in compliance with the state, school districts must provide a minimum of 75,600 minutes of instruction every year. This year, the district met the minimum by having 149 instructional days and extending the school day by 30 minutes. Next year, it plans to increase instructional days to 157 days, equating to 80,070 minutes, a number closer to the minutes obtained by the traditional five-week.
The district will no longer be hosting “Shorthorn Success Days” on Fridays, which it used this year to provide additional one-on-one tutoring for certain students. By law, school districts are required to provide 30 hours of tutoring for all students who fail the STAAR test. Board Member Yolanda Morales Jurado, whose son is a junior at MISD, was concerned no more success days would mean less one-on-one instruction. “One of the things that I really appreciated was the Shorthorn Success Days for the kids, and they were able to get the one-on-one attention and things like that,” she said. “How are we going to continue with that?”
Alferez said the district will still comply with state law and bake additional tutoring into the school day, whether in the morning or during certain class periods, which MISD teachers okayed. The decision not to have Shorthorn Success Days was also partially a financial one, Alferez said in a follow-up interview with The Big Bend Sentinel.
Because Fridays were not a day school was formally in session with attendance taken, the district could not collect average daily attendance (ADA), money the district receives from the state based on attendance, on those days. But the district was shelling out money to run buses, keep the lights on and provide snacks on those days. The district is unable to provide free meals to students on days off due to state policy, Alferez said.
Alferez told trustees despite the issues, there is support for the four-day school week among staff, students and some parents he talked to. But he also warned that the four-day week was coming under fire politically, from the commissioner of education and Governor Greg Abbott, and may no longer be allowed to continue the following year.
The concept of the four-day school week is gaining popularity across the state, especially among understaffed rural districts, as a way to attract and retain teachers. When the school board first voted to adopt the alternative schedule in February 2023, it was also thought that it might help attract more families and combat the district’s declining enrollment.
At the start of the 2022-2023 school year, the district had 269 students enrolled. By the end of that year, enrollment had dropped to 233 students. Now, at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, the district has 213 students enrolled. Alferez said families are continuing to move out of Marfa to seek other employment, and in the post-COVID era, many students are enrolling in online academies. “We’re not growing as a school district,” Alferez said. “We’re not getting an influx of families coming in with students.”
Questions about how the four-day week impacts student’s educational outcomes and school attendance remain. Alferez told The Sentinel more data still needed to be gathered to measure the effectiveness of the four-day week. “We have to see data — what we had this year, compared to what we’re about to have next year. Once we have that data, we can compare and actually see if a four-day week is something that Marfa can continue, or we go back to a five-day week,” Alferez said.
He said the main reason for adopting the four-day week was teacher retention, and with the exception of the recent resignations of Elementary Principal Amy White and teacher and coach Edgar Ramirez, the district was well-staffed regarding teachers.
“With the shortage of teachers and administrators, schools started to adopt a four-day week just to retain educators in the district,” Alferez said. “The other stuff with student achievement, student attendance, that came more into it as the year went on, but the whole purpose for this was to retain teachers.”
If you are a Marfa ISD parent or guardian interested in sharing your thoughts about the four-day school week, please reach out to reporter Mary Cantrell at mkcantrell@bigbendsentinel.com.