Schools today are causing more stress with all the homework, difficult classes and the pandemic. 75% of high school students express boredom, fear, anger, sadness, or stress while in school. On a 10 point scale, with 3.8 being average for adults, American teens rated their stress at an average of 5.8 and it’s still going up. https://research.com/education/student-stress-statistics#:~:text=75%25%20of%20U.S.%20high%20school,an%20average%20score%20of%205.8

A solution to that problem is a four day school week. With a four day school week students gain an extra work day or just a day to get anything done, they could run errands, visit people and it gives people time to pursue other interests. And for student athletes they will miss less days and have less work to make up when they miss days for a sports event. Teachers would have more time to get work done; it helps make the teachers and students more productive because their schedules aren’t so crammed. 

Some more positives to this are, it adds flexibility to teachers schedules, increased student attendance, and saves the school district money. This was seen in New Mexico schools that have a four day week. Doing this would save .85% of the school’s budget. A four day school week would help almost all the students and stress levels would decrease drastically. The four day week provides a day for relaxation, rest, and just not being in a stressful environment. A four day week could also help the workforce. Companies could benefit with increased sales and the workers would have less stress and also more time to relax and rest. It also can lead to harder working, more committed and happier employees. 

At the Mount Vernon High School there are a couple classes a year that hand out tons of homework and it stresses a lot of students out, but with an extra day the homework wouldn’t seem so bad.  Less stressed students make for a happier school so if Mount Vernon changed to a four day week, Mount Vernon High School would be a happier place.There are also some negatives to this opposition which are a potential decline in academic performance for vulnerable students. There is also a potential for juvenile crimes to increase, but there isn’t much data to prove this. 

After seeing all of this we can see that a four day week has positives that out way the negatives and it would help everyone’s personal lives more without making the company or schools struggle. I think if students and teachers both think this is a good idea then we should try it. It could start with a smaller portion of schools for a couple years and then compare the different sets of data.