What We Studied and Why It Matters
Districts adopt the four-day school week for two main reasons: to keep staff and to save money. Nearly all of the causal evidence on the calendar’s workforce effects looks at teachers, yet non-teaching staff — paraeducators, custodians, bus drivers, food service workers, and administrative staff — make up roughly half of public-school employment, and most of the promised savings run through their jobs. We use difference-in-differences models with Missouri administrative data to estimate how four-day week adoption affects non-teacher staffing, retention, and district expenditures. We find no meaningful improvement in retention among student-facing staff and no change in how districts organize their workforces. On the budget side, districts do realize modest savings in transportation, food service, and operations, but those savings are more than consumed by rising tuition payments that follow students to outside providers. On net, districts do not spend less after adopting the four-day week. What the calendar changes is composition: turnover shifts toward cross-district movement among paraeducators, and spending shifts from districts’ own operations toward tuition. For districts weighing the calendar, our evidence suggests it is a change in how time and money are organized rather than a source of budget relief or a staffing solution.
Links
Citation
@misc{kaler2026,
author = {Kaler, Lindsey and Kistler, Hannah C. and Camp, Andrew M.
and Anglum, J. Cameron and Nguyen, Tuan D.},
title = {Staffing, {Retention,} and {Expenditures} in the {Four-Day}
{School} {Week}},
date = {2026-09-14},
url = {https://andrewmcamp.com/writings/spotlight/mo-4dsw-staffing.html},
langid = {en}
}