The Wiggins School District is switching to a four-day school week this school year.

Superintendent Trent Kerr said the school board made the decision in January after months of internal district discussion and community feedback.

After school starts on Aug. 15, Kerr said the first four-day weeks will begin after Labor Day Weekend.

Kindergarten is scheduled to start Aug. 22.

He said this will be implemented from pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade.

Kerr said the decision was motivated by the district’s desire to retain their teachers and provide better learning outcomes for their students.

As the district reportedly loses teachers after a couple of years to higher-paying positions in other parts of the state, Kerr says, “we had to do something to be able to retain and recruit teachers.”

He said they recently had a mathematics teacher position open for 19 months without any applications.

Kerr said they did recently raise their base pay for teachers, but felt they needed to consider other options to be more competitive. He said they began considering and discussing the option from May to August 2018.

“As a school board, as an accountability team, as a staff, we sat down and discussed the pros and cons of a four-day week, what our goal was and our ‘why’ for it,” Kerr said.

In 2018, they sent a survey to community members, along with having the survey for at school registration and on their website.

He said 72 percent of respondents said they would like to have a four-day week.

“Once we got that information in, we were back to the school board, and the board voted to approve a four-day school week,” Kerr said. He said this was at a January 2019 school board meeting.

Kerr said each school day will be ten minutes longer. For secondary school levels, high school and middle school, each class will have several more minutes.

Students will have 156 “student contact days” instead of 162 in previous years, Kerr reports, and school is starting a week earlier.
Kerr said most of the days off will be Mondays. He said they will take the Friday off at the end of every quarter, after parent teacher conferences and on state championship event weeks.

He said the current scheduled last day of school is May 21, 2020.

“I’ve talked to different superintendents around, some of them do say they have seen test scores improve, some say they haven’t seen test scores do anything,” Kerr says.

For those concerned about childcare on the fifth day of the week, Kerr says the school is not implementing any additional programs this year but have heard there will be programs at local churches.

“For the impact on the students, we did this to be able to retain good teachers,” Kerr said. “We’ve been struggling here so much recently with teachers staying for a year or two and going to the front range.”

“The biggest reason behind this for our students, is for good, quality teachers that stay,” he added.

Kerr said that many of the fifth days of the week will be utilized for professional development or lesson planning for the educators.

“We’re really excited for the four-day week and what that can allow us to do for our teachers through professional development, through mentoring and for them to be able to lesson plan better and more effectively,” Kerr said.

“Hopefully that leads them to stay and to better test scores, better morale and a better environment for our students,” he added

Kerr said he is excited to see how this impacts the school environment and teacher retention.

“All of the superintendents that I’ve talked to have said the overall building environment seems to change in this,” Kerr said. “When students are here, teachers are here, they’re more focused, and they actually get through more lessons and curriculum than in the past.”

School safety
Kerr said this school year a school resource officer and several teachers will have concealed handgun permits (CHP) and agreed to take on a security responsibility.

“We have staff that are armed this year,” Kerr said. “We will have staff that have concealed carry.”

Kerr said they are not publicly releasing which teachers, how many teachers or when teachers will be armed.

“We have seen how, with our school resource officer on campus, we think we have seen a real change in the way the kids feel about the school,” Kerr said. “They feel safe, they feel secure.”

“There is one of him and we have over 700 students. We have three buildings in the district, so we wanted to make sure that all of the building were secure and safe, with someone able to be there if there were something to happen, God forbid,” he added.

Kerr said the teachers certified to have the CHPs follow state qualifications and have taken training, had background checks and had psychological evaluations.

Kerr said they are working on ensuring their district campus is secure, requiring a license check with their automatic background check system for visitors when they enter.

“It’s just to make sure we are always prepared, and our kids are safe as we can make them,” Kerr added.

Bus drivers
Kerr said the district is in dire need of school bus drivers this year. He said they currently have four bus drivers for six routes.
“Every week there will be two routes that are not run,” Kerr explained.

Kerr encouraged anyone interested in applying to a bus driver position to contact the school district.

New building
The new Wiggins High School and Middle School also received recognition recently.

The project was awarded first place by the Engineering News-Record’s 2019 Best Projects competition. The project was considered in their Kindergarten through twelfth grade category, across seven states.

“The 56,450 square foot expansion and renovation project was designed and constructed with students’ best interests in mind—from a daily learning environment to campus safety. Updates to the learning environment addressed a growing student population and an expanding faculty/staff,” a press release from Adolfson & Peterson Construction reads.

Professional development
Kerr said the district has four strategic priorities they are working on this year, based off of their feedback they received from the Student-Centered Accountability Project last year.

“It’s a group of rural schools,” Kerr said. “We identify three major elements of meaningful learning, professional culture and where we can put and prioritize our resources.”

Kerr said that each of the group members are evaluated by a group of their education professional peers in a one- to two-day process.

“There’s group of schools that go around and observe their peers in other school districts,” Kerr explained. “We do parent surveys, teacher surveys, student surveys. We do teacher, parent and student discussion groups and question and answer sessions.”

He said Wiggins School District had this evaluation in April 2018.

“Then we have a group of superintendents, principals and teachers from other districts, they go through and actually observe what’s going on in the schools,” he added.

Once the results are compiled, Kerr said the district is scored on their learning culture, school environment, curriculum and leadership. He said their staff came together to receive the results all together.

“After the results came back, we identified these four areas as what we needed to focus on to improve the district,” Kerr explained.

Kerr said they identified four focus areas: empower students to own their education through data-created learning plans; create relationships district-wide; enhancing professional communication and collaboration; and safety and self-care.

Kerr said they are considering their schools’ data from Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS), Preliminary SAT scores and other sources to “start tearing apart the standards at each grade level, so we can align our curriculum horizontally and vertically, and then map all of our curriculum this year.”

For the focus on district-wide relationships, Kerr said, “We want to extend this out to the ever-growing and diversifying district that we are.”
“We’re wanting to look at ourselves and design ways to reach out to the new families and have them become more invested in the schools,” he added.

Kerr said they are looking at the relationships between teachers, administrators, parents, students and the overall community.
“What we’re looking at is across the board: administrator to teacher, teacher to student, teacher to teacher, student to student and district to community,” Kerr said.

The third focus area of professional communication and collaboration also connects to these relationships.

“Our principals are going to work on constructive and timely feedback,” Kerr said. “Not only to the teacher but to also from teachers to students, administrators and parents.”

The “safety and self-care” strategy focuses both on student mental health and school safety.

“We have never had a program that addresses mental health needs, so we have partnered with Morgan County mental health services and are going to provide sources of strength for the district,” Kerr explained.

Kerr said they will also have student peer mentors this year and hope to expand it district-wide.

Kara Morgan: kmorgan@fmtimes.com or 970-441-5103