Hannah Adamson, Fox59 Joins!

**Nigel** (0:00)
Hammer and Nigel.

**Hannah Adamson** (0:02)
You believe these characters are weirdos?

**Nigel** (0:04)
So let's rock it! Hello, everybody. My name is Nigel. Jason Himmer right over there with a very special guest on the hotline.

**Jason Himmer** (0:11)
Our news gathering partners are Fox59 and Hannah Adamson is one of the reporters over there.
Hannah's got a story out right now. You can read about it. About a possible four day school week. Hannah, welcome to the Hammer and Nigel Show. How are you?

**Hannah Adamson** (0:30)
I'm good. Thank you so much for having me.

**Jason Himmer** (0:32)
No, thank you for joining us here. All right, let's get down to brass tacks here. Tell me about this story you've got, where there's a school district, maybe a couple, that are kicking around the idea of four day school week.

**Hannah Adamson** (0:47)
Sure. So in the state of Indiana, there is one school in the entire state that's adopted the system so far, Benton Elementary and Lafayette.
But there are a number of schools who are interested in adopting this kind of a schedule. So what this new law does, it requires schools to meet four new criteria. They have to be able to provide remedial opportunities, enrichment opportunities for that fifth day, that would normally be a traditional school day. They also have to provide, let's say you're a parent who wants your child to go to a traditional five-day school. If your school wants to make the switch, they have to provide transportation for your child to go to a different school.
They also have to meet the minimum teacher salary threshold of $45,000 a year. And then they also have to meet, I'm sure as you all know, the state of Indiana recently adopted a new school accountability model that gives schools themselves a letter grade A through F. So schools that maintain that A grade, the top of the class, so to speak, they have to meet that before they can then apply for a waiver to go switch to that four day system. Again, still a very novel concept in the state. Only one school has done it. And now the state has decided to implement these new guidelines for schools that may want to follow suit.

**Nigel** (2:12)
Do you know what prompted the Department of Education to issue this guidance now?

**Hannah Adamson** (2:18)
So, in talking with lawmakers who worked on this legislation, there were two things that popped up.
Number one, depending on who you ask, the state is seeing a child care crisis. I know there are some within Republican leadership who are really hesitant to label it as such. But there was a concern by some lawmakers that if a school were to make the switch, what would parents do on that fifth day if their work week didn't allow them very easily to adjust. So they wanted to add a requirement that school must transport those kids to a five-day traditional school system. There was a concern that parents, if their school makes the switch, they wouldn't be able to find child care or maybe they couldn't afford it for that day. So that was one of the concerns here. The second concern was we have a sample size of one in the state, and while anecdotally it's providing benefits to those kids, we don't really know what the long-term ramifications or impacts of a four-day system have on academic achievement for students. So I think there were a handful of lawmakers that wanted to learn more about what that could do, what that could mean. Is this going to work for every single kid in the state? Probably not. Will it help some kids in the state? Absolutely. But I think what they wanted was a bit more firm information, if you will, on the long-term impact, which we really just don't have at this time. Very few schools nationwide have decided to make this switch. I believe it's close to 2 percent of schools across the country.
So they just wanted to make sure they had some guidelines ready to go in case more schools were interested in making the switch.

**Jason Himmer** (4:07)
Hannah Adamson is our guest from Fox59. She's got a story right now you can see at fox59.com about some schools kicking around the idea of a four-day school week. Hannah, you mentioned earlier one of the key points is that these schools have to prove to teachers that they would be able to provide their salary and move forward like it were a five-day school week.
How important are financials in this conversation? I know we don't have a very big sample size, but the school that's doing the four-day school week, do they have less of a cost in operating? And is this kind of a response to what these schools are doing with the loss of property taxes and maybe instead of doing referendums, they're thinking about doing four-day school weeks. Do we know anything at all about the financials?