It’s All About Work-Life Balance: SMSD should implement a shorter school week

With blurry vision and dark purple under-eye bags, students fill in the last answer on their Pre-Calc homework and set the alarm for three hours later: 6 a.m. With seven classes worth of homework every night, this stress-inducing routine is repeated five nights a week.

The looming expectations of getting into the best college or being successful after high school push the “never take a break” lifestyle. And it’s threatening to the mental health of teenagers. 

To improve productivity for both students and teachers and decrease both mental health issues and school costs, the Shawnee Mission School District should consider piloting a four-day week for the five high schools in the district. The anxiety-inducing culture of racing from school to clubs to practice to hours of homework for the large majority of the week needs to stop — an extra break day is a way to help.

High school has become prime grounds for an over-intensive work environment — there needs to be a catch-your-breath day to regroup a little. If it’s seven hours of school, two hours of practice or a club and three hours of homework a night, students are ‘working’ 12-hour days and 60-hour weeks. Compared to the average of 45 hours a week in the workforce, this is too much and results in a never ending cycle. It’s intense. 

Teenagers have never been more anxious, according to neatoday.org. And a survey written about on their website says that nearly two-thirds of students were overwhelmingly anxious, which increased from only half just five years before. 

Mental health experts are describing this increase in anxiety as an epidemic.The goal of taking this extra day for a break wouldn’t be to get out of school — it’s to take a break. A break that can heal our brains, reduce anxiety and give us time so we can return to feeling more relaxed and ready to be productive again. 

Something always needs to be done, whether that be college applications, the rhetorical analysis of “Into the Wild” or mastering the periodic table.

There’s no time to be a kid. We find ourselves turning down family dinners because of the hours of studying that need to happen after practice. And when we do have to sit still and be with family, our leg anxiously taps under the table because of the looming thought of homework. We stay up late to get everything done and the “nine hours of recommended sleep” gets laughed off too often.

That break day can bring time for family, for a rest, for sleep. And at a time when anxiety is being called an epidemic, a built-in mental health day is more important than ever. 

The trend of piloting and implementing a four-day week has already been carried out by 560 U.S. districts and is becoming increasingly more popular, according to ncsl.org. Japan Microsoft recently piloted a strategy similar to this where they shortened the employee work week by one day — which meant Monday through Thursday — and their relative productivity increased by 40%. 

A culture of hard work in our society produces stress and anxiety both in the workplace and in schools. Japan’s culture of overworking has stretched to the point at which people die from working too much. 

Both Japanese and American employees spend over 45 hours a week at work, according to businessinsider.com. Instead of going on vacation, employees in both countries are staying at work longer than people in other developed countries. Their lives and value is found in their work. And students are the same way. 

When Japan Microsoft broke this stereotype by shortening their work week to four days, they not only saw a 40% increase in productivity, but CEO Takuya Hirano also noticed the workers were happier with the extra break.

Their mood booster came from the extra time they had to recuperate and take a load off for themselves — their lives were not engulfed in work.

And with an extra day, attendance has been proven to go up. Districts like the Lathrop School District, which is located 40 miles north of Kansas City, MO, have seen this increase because the extra day is a chance to fit in appointments for check-ups. And the chance of getting sick decreases when more sleep is implemented into the week. Both of these decrease the makeup work and falling behind in classes — something no high schooler or teacher wants to deal with. 

There are currently around 560 districts through 25 states that have one or more schools on a four-day schedule. Colorado has about 98 school districts working with the four-day week, whereas Kansas has seven. 

Those seven, which include Caney Valley and Bluestem, make up only 2% of school districts in Kansas. And if SMSD wants to continue producing intellectually competitive and mentally healthy students, ours should be added to the list. 

At this time, SMSD is claiming that there isn’t enough money to cover what they want to accomplish as a district. This could be the way to do that, while simultaneously benefitting the mental health of students and teachers. 

The Lathrop School District was the first Missouri School to move to a four-day work week. According to fox4kc.com, the early figures said the savings would total to around $100,000 a year, which was proven true eight years later. And that money went towards budget reserves and the teacher salaries — so the teachers got paid more. During a time where this was

Our district could save thousands from the change to a four day week — there would be three weekend days instead of two where the electricity and utility bills wouldn’t cost as much. Sure, there would be sports practices or events, but that would be something that a few janitors would be able to handle, instead of the whole janitorial staff. 

The way we’d meet the number of minutes required each school year is unknown since we’ve never done it before. Some schools like Lathrop added hours onto the school year, and others have shorter breaks. But, according to Dr. Leonard, one option for us could be increasing each school day to last until 3:30 or 4:00 p.m.

While removing a full school day from the week would require working out the hole of organizing, the benefits would quickly fill it — it would be helping the students, teachers and schools throughout the SMSD. Students can put their Chemistry homework away for 24 hours so their brain can rest and the problem of anxiety can be reduced — all while saving money for the district.