Kootenai School District adopts four-day week to aid teachers, students

A four-day school week is now set in Kootenai Joint School District #274, a change that will ripple through family schedules in Harrison, on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene, and through the daily work of teachers who need more time for paperwork, planning and grading.

The school board unanimously approved the switch Tuesday, and the district’s 2025-26 calendar already reflects the new schedule. Superintendent Brad Baumberger said the shorter week is meant to help staff manage the demands that stack up across a school year, and to reduce learning loss tied to frequent Friday absences.

Kootenai is taking a different path from many of the other Idaho districts and charters already on four-day calendars. The move is not being framed as a cost-cutting step or a teacher-retention strategy, even though those arguments have helped drive the model elsewhere in the state. Instead, district leaders are presenting it as a practical response to the day-to-day work of keeping classrooms running and students on track.

That places Kootenai inside a fast-growing Idaho shift. Idaho Education News has reported that 95 other districts and charters already use a four-day schedule, and about 100,000 Idaho students will attend a four-day school this fall, nearly four times the number from nine years ago. Rural districts have led much of that expansion, as families and school staff weigh the promise of more flexible schedules against the costs of one less day in class.

The research on those tradeoffs is mixed. RAND Corporation studies have found high satisfaction among families, students and staff, but no quantitative evidence that four-day weeks improve student attendance. The same analyses found lower English language arts and math scores over time among students on four-day schedules compared with five-day peers.

Idaho’s State Board of Education has also moved to set minimum instructional-day rules, but Idaho Education News reported the change is unlikely to significantly alter four-day calendars. For Kootenai, the shift is already built into the coming school year, turning a statewide trend into a local test of whether more time away from the classroom can still serve students in it.