As education in Arizona deals with low budgets and subsequently low student achievement,  public schools often search for ways to save money where they can.

The newest way of doing this is by switching to a four-day school week. Across the state, 43 school districts have now switched to four-day school weeks. This allows for school districts to spare one days worth of food and janitorial supply costs.

While this works for saving schools money, I think that Brophy could adopt this new four day school week in collaboration with the new block schedule.

The current block schedule uses “A” days and “B” days, and each day the schedule switches from an “A” day to a “B” day or vice versa.

However, since there are five days in the school week, classes would meet an uneven number of days per week if it wasn’t for the rotating weekly schedule as well.

The current schedule creates unneeded animosity. If the school week were to be shortened to four days a week, students would still have “A” and “B” days every other day, but there would be no need for the rotating weekly schedule and students would have each class an even number of times throughout the week.

There is also a Community Period on “B” days, which allows students to attend club meetings, play intramural sports and meet with counselors or teachers. 

The four day school week would allow for an even number of community periods per week, and therefore make things like scheduling meetings easier.

As well as helping students, embracing this new schedule would also make the week much smoother for teachers. 

Teachers would not have to worry about how many class meetings each of their periods have in a given week, and would be able to make a more efficient schedule across each of their sections.

While switching to a four-day school week may seem odd, it could help Brophy streamline their class schedule and it already works well with the new block schedule.