First Four-Day Week Disrupts Routine

By Nini Lu ’29

Last week, the Milton administration implemented the first-ever four-day week schedule, a change that drew discontent and disrupted regular routines for both students and faculty. Yom Kippur, the holy day of fasting in the Jewish calendar, landed on Monday, September 21, and led to this school year’s first long weekend.

In the previous academic year, four federal holidays fell on a Monday. However, this year, students are expected to miss class on ten Mondays throughout this school year. During an Upper School Meeting, Academic Dean Ms. Sarah Jacobs discussed how classes during blocks that meet on Mondays inevitably fall behind classes that meet on the other days of the week, which are rarely missed. Jacobs emphasized that the decision was not spontaneous, and that conversations with a committee of teachers frustrated about this issue began around spring break the previous year. She noted that a special four-day schedule is a common fix among Milton’s peer schools. Indeed, Phillips Exeter Academy utilized a shift of their schedule during a week last February in which the classes missed on Monday instead met on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Deerfield’s schedule, which usually consists of the same three classes every alternate day, has involved six classes squeezed into a single day during shortened weeks.

Milton’s similar willingness as a school to innovate in the face of scheduling issues demonstrates its strong commitment to student learning. However, there is no well-documented case where a New England prep school consistently allows for one missed day’s disruptions to alter the course of the entire week. While there clearly lies a reason for the new schedule, the execution for our specific case was not well-received by the overall community. Some courses met three days in a row. Regular classes were shortened from an hour to forty-five minutes and extended classes from eighty minutes to seventy minutes, while club blocks were shoved out of the day entirely, occupying a time when most sports practices and extracurricular commitments take place. Additionally, nearly everyone in the school had the same lunch block.

90% of 246 students who filled out a form on the new schedule rated their enjoyment a one or a two out of five, while 56% of twenty-three teachers who filled out the survey rated their enjoyment a one or a two.

Most of the pushback came from three points: the workload, afternoon commitments, and lunches. Kaia Evans ’27 noted how especially early on in the year, when workload was already variable, the week felt very stressful, as it crammed “five days of work into four days.” This stress was corroborated by Hannah McComb ’29, who found that “[students] also had more [homework] due to the nature of the 4-day week.” More homework inevitably leads to less sleep, making it difficult for students to remain alert in class and participate to the best of their abilities.

The increase of classes in the school day, addition of clubs to an afterschool block, and delay of sports and rehearsals further cut into homework time. Madeleine Stuart ’29 shared that her sports practices “often went late, and some of [her] teammates missed the six [o’clock] bus.” Additionally, Stuart felt “it [was] difficult to choose between clubs and sports.” Moreover, Isaac Wu ’28 added that many coaches continued to “[demand] athletes attend practice at the usual time,” compounding further stress, especially for multidisciplinary students. Emmett Burghardt ’27, co-head of Future Health Professionals, noted that when the club met last period on Friday, it “had about a 30% decrease in attendance when compared to the first meeting last year despite gaining 30 new members this year and losing only a few.” He concluded that the club blocks simply do not fit into the schedule well.

Additionally, Alex Signorovitch ’29 commented that “most of the school was having lunch at the same time,” meaning nearly 700 students, along with some faculty and staff, were in Forbes Dining Hall. Multiple students stated that they simply left Forbes and gave up on lunch or went to their dorms to microwave instant ramen. One student also noted that the overcrowded dining hall overtaxed the staff, who hustled to fill constantly emptying trays and squeeze by endless snakes of lines. Even after students got food, the lack of open chairs left them sitting on alternate objects or standing. For a decision that had been in planning for such a long time, “the details did not seem to be thoroughly considered,” Signorovitch said.

Yet, despite the immediate pushback from students, some felt it adequately addressed concerns around class distribution. In an anonymous survey response, one teacher conceded that while the schedule “was not perfect,” seeing all [their] classes was a “game-changer.” Thus, while potentially unleashing chaos on students, the schedule succeeded in its original intentions. Some teachers also noted the importance of comparing this new system not to a normal five-day week, but instead to past special schedules which were slightly different in each shortened week and especially prevalent last fall.

The coming school year is set to include around a dozen 4-day weeks and, presumably, the administration will make changes to hone the structure of the schedule as the year progresses. Many members of the community are already suggesting alternate 4-day week changes. Burghardt, for example, suggested having each class meet twice a week with slightly longer class meetings. Multiple form respondents recommend the relatively simple change of running the usual Monday schedule on a Tuesday for half of the Mondays we miss to balance out some of the uneven amounts of class time lost between blocks. Multiple teachers have also suggested the idea of continuing to retain a limit of three to four subjects of homework per night.

As a conclusion on the value of the four-day schedule, Wu, citing the value of preliminary testing to the scientific method, stated, “We must not fall into the trap of a forced policy change as an experiment… This ‘preliminary trial’ has significantly harmed the year already in the first month of school, and its continuation will only harm more.”