Budget woes are problematic for many states. Kansas cut taxes...and is a disaster. Nebraska is going the same route...and in Oklahoma, schools are suffering so much, the school week is being cut to 4 days.
Budget cuts have forced many Oklahoma schools to shorten to a four-day week
...But funding for classrooms has been shrinking for years in this deep-red state as lawmakers have cut taxes, slicing away hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue in what some Oklahomans consider a cautionary tale about the real-life consequences of the small-government approach favored by Republican majorities in Washington and statehouses nationwide.
School districts staring down deep budget holes have turned to shorter weeks in desperation as a way to save a little bit of money and persuade increasingly hard-to-find teachers to take some of the nation's lowest-paying jobs.
Of 513 school districts in Oklahoma, 96 have lopped Fridays or Mondays off their schedules - nearly triple the number in 2015 and four times as many as in 2013. An additional 44 are considering cutting instructional days by moving to a four-day week in the fall or by shortening the school year, the Oklahoma State School Boards Association found in a survey last month.
"I don't think it's right. I think our kids are losing out on education," said Sandy Robertson, a grandmother of four in Newcastle, a fast-growing rural community set amid wheat and soybean fields south of Oklahoma City. "They're trying to cram a five-day week into a four-day week."
Oklahoma is not the only state where more students are getting three-day weekends, a concept that dates to the 1930s. The number is climbing slowly across broad swaths of the rural big-sky West, driven by a combination of austere budgets, fuel-guzzling bus rides and teacher shortages that have turned four-day weeks into an important recruiting tool.
The four-day week is a "contagion," said Paul Hill, a research professor at the University of Washington at Bothell who has studied the phenomenon in Idaho and who worries that the consequences of the shift - particularly for poor kids - are unknown...
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article153098019.html