Baxter moving to 4-day school week in 2025-26

In a unanimous decision, the Baxter Community School Board at its February meeting approved moving to a four day school week for the 2025-26 school year. With, on average, 70 to 80 percent of feedback either neutral or in favor of the switch, the district felt strong support to make the change.

“It’s a big undertaking and a big change,” Baxter Superintendent Chris Petersen said.

Work started on the idea to move to four days in September, Petersen said. Along with his administrative team and the school board, Petersen began researching what a four day school week would look like for the Baxter community. One big driver for the district was turnover in the teaching staff year in and year out.

“As we are looking at improving student outcomes and what we can provide for students, one of the things we were noticing consistently over the past three or four years is we are turning over about 25 to 30 percent of our staff (each year). The last school year we had to fill 14 teaching positions and nine of those positions either have zero applicants or one,” Petersen said. “One of the things we talked about was how do we provide the best eduction for kids, which directly ties in to providing high quality teachers, and how do we provide consistency for kids, which means how do we keep those teachers.”

When looking at data, Petersen found that many teachers were leaving Baxter to move to higher paying positions in the greater Des Moines metro area. With public school districts receiving around 2 percent increases to funding from the state legislature, he knew that Baxter wouldn’t be able to match up to the larger districts.

“We started looking to see if there is something we can do to level the playing field to get and retain high quality teachers,” Petersen said.

When researching districts in the state that had converted to four day school weeks, Petersen found Martensdale-St. Marys as a close comparable for Baxter. With similar student body sizes, open enrollment numbers and distances from metro areas, it was a good place to learn how it might impact Baxter.

“I spent quite a bit of time with their superintendent asking questions, learning the process they used, which we in turn used when planning ours,” Petersen said. “Most importantly, I asked him, ‘Did the retention change for you when you made the move?’ He said the year before they switched they had 15 teacher openings. Once they made the move they only had three openings.”

Looking closer at the data before the switch, Martensdale-St. Marys had four elementary positions open and only received six applications. The next year after moving to four days, the district had two elementary openings with 19 applications received for one position and 16 for the other.

“It was quite a drastic change in their applicant pool,” Petersen said.

As the leadership teams moved forward with the research, the move to reach out to the community and get opinions from locals on how they felt about the change. An community information meeting was held in December with about 150 people in attendance. A 2024 survey was also made available to everyone in the community to learn opinions and concerns about the idea.

“We let people know early on that really it isn’t going to be a decision made by the school board or superintendent; it is going to be based on the data we receive from the parents and public,” Petersen said. “The initial survey data came in. And even with a second survey it stayed really consistent with 75 to 80 percent of the people either neutral or in favor.”

The district released a FAQ document addressing questions and concerns along with holding a public forum with both Martensdale-St. Marys and Saydel superintendents, who both have four day school weeks, in attendance.

“They shared their experience both from concerns and the planning process and once it was implemented,” Petersen said.

One concern the district wanted to address was child care. The school itself does not run a child care center but it wants to be active in helping parents with any struggles they may have as it moves to no school on Mondays.

“We have a care center across from the school. While we don’t provide care we could provide them space,” Petersen said. “We also had some high school students and paras approach us about baby-sitting or providing care.”

A surprising finding from the other districts was how child care started out as a big concern but once the switch was implemented it wasn’t mentioned as an issue.

“After talking to 10 different districts they said daycare was the number one issue at the onset and it has not been an issue since,” Petersen said.

Two additional concerns were academic performance and the length of the school day. The district previously shared research has found there is little to no negative impact on academic achievement. Districts that operate with 30 or more student hours per week showed no significant impact on student achievement.

“(The switch) adds 40 minutes to the school day,” Petersen said. “As we looked at our calendar this year and the number of student contact hours we have this year, we actually will have almost identical student contact hours next year. We don’t really lose that academic time.”

As for why the district selected Mondays, Petersen once again listened to the public.

“We did Mondays for a few different reasons,” Petersen said. “In the past, we had a PD and a lot of holidays fall on Mondays, so it felt like more of an easier transition. We got some feedback to leave Fridays alone, feedback from the community to have it be on a Monday.”

As the move to four days goes into effect, work on how it is impacting students and staff will not stop. As with any new program or change, leaders will continue to evaluate it as the school year progresses.

“One thing that we will do is after we implement this next year we’re consistently evaluating it and reevaluating it,” Petersen said. “Both from an academic standpoint and a community-feeling standpoint, extracurricular, all of those concerns, we are going to make sure we reevaluate on a continuous basis.”

With the decision made, work will begin to take the research and potential plans and make them a reality.

“Now that we move into the transition phase we’re working with each staff group. What does it look like for curriculum. What does it look like for extra curricular transportation on Mondays,” Petersen said. “Now we can go into the planning.”