school week to compete with larger school systems that can often afford to pay teachers more so this is a chart. reporter: veteran teacher laura hunt was considering a new career until she heard about the shorter week i remember being a teacher and spending my sundays lesson planning and grading papers and it s more than just the school week what will this change mean for your life i feel like it s buying me some of that family time back that used to be consumed with school tasks. reporter: while students who attend school four days a week are still learning, research shows they don t grow as much as those in school five days a week a recent study found students with four day weeks spent an average of 58 fewer hours in school every year. hours that experts say add up and can be detrimental over time. is that a concern? especially given the learning loss from the pandemic that s a big concern. there s going to be a greater opportunity for families to do extracurricular thing
a well-work life balance for our teachers. it gives our teaches an opportunity to plan on those fridays. we will be bringing in teachers one friday a month to do lesson planning together and collaborating together. right now teachers work about 60 hours a week. this is giving them extra time with their families but also they will be better prepared in the classroom. ainsley: all right. and, john, how about you? what are you all doing? what about last year? didn t you have to go into some of your classes and substitute teach? yes. i worked in several classrooms and several different positions. i did some teaching. i worked as a substitute paraprofessional in special education setting. i think it s really important that all of us roll up our sleeves as much as we need to to make sure that we have the supports for our students. we aren t changing our schedule. we realize we have some significant unfinished learning and social emotional needs for our students so we are going with a ful