The Whitney Independent School District (WISD) Board of Trustees met in regular session Monday, January 13, and discussed a potential move to a four-day week for the 2025-26 school year.
“We’ve been talking about this for a little bit,” said Superintendent Todd Southard. “When we sat down and started talking about this – why we might want to go down this road – it really boiled down to personnel, and it is a personnel issue that we’re struggling with.”
Southard said that the district is struggling with teacher recruitment and retention, as well as providing an acceptable work-life balance to staff. “This issue is not exclusive to Whitney ISD, by no stretch of the imagination,” he said. “Every district in the state of Texas is struggling with finding teachers and with retaining teachers – it’s just the way it is right now.”
The superintendent said that the teacher applicant pool is small right now, adding that 15 years ago, he could post a job and have 30 applicants respond. “When you’re sitting down and you’ve got four or three applicants, getting that right person becomes that much more difficult,” he said.
Southard discussed the widespread decline in popularity of the teaching profession as a whole, as well as the fact that around half of those who go into teaching leave the field within five years.
“When you look at 2020 — that was right when COVID was starting to hit — you had about 58% of the people who were in the classrooms thinking about leaving…seriously considering it,” he said. That number has not dropped, he explained. In fact, he said it continues to rise.
“So we’ve got a little bit of this perfect storm going on, and the fact of the matter is we’re in competition for teachers,” he said. “We are in a huge competition for teachers; we’re in a huge competition to retain teachers. I want to make this clear – retain teachers as well as recruit teachers.”
Southard cited several more issues the district faces, including pay for WISD staff averaging roughly $2,000 less than others in the region, a relatively large number of campuses in relation to the amount of students and a lack of support for less experienced staff.
Currently, Whitney middle and high school students attend school for 465 minutes per day, while elementary and intermediate school students attend for 455 minutes daily. Under a four-day school week, students would spend approximately 20 to 30 minutes more per day in school. “So you’re not talking a ton of extra time,” Southard said.
Currently, the district has a total of 168 instructional days in a school year. A four-day week would bring that down to 155 days. Southard said, “Of all the concerns that we have, this is probably the biggest… It’s a different mindset for the teachers, to where you have got to go hard every minute, every day, all the time.
“But I will tell you that the number one determining factor for kids being successful in the classroom is time on task; meaning ‘you get in there, and you work,’ and this schedule forces you to do that.”
Southard presented an example of what a four-day calendar could look like for the upcoming school year, suggesting that Mondays would be staff development days that students would have off.
While most districts take Fridays off when moving to a four-day calendar, he reasoned that Mondays would provide the district’s less experienced teachers a better opportunity to prepare and plan for the week ahead. Along with professional development, these days would be used for educators to get ahead of their work in the classroom.
He said that the amount of take-home work is one of the things driving teachers out of education. “Our goal is to try and give them a little bit of a break, because they need to have lives outside of being a teacher.”
Under the proposed calendar, students would still attend school for all five days in certain weeks following a prolonged break in order to meet the required class time by summer. For further information on the potential move to a four-day week and to review the proposed calendar, visit whitneyisd.org.
In other agenda items, the board approved a junior high student trip to Washington D.C. with sixth grade teacher Kaelyn New through WorldStrides. The chaperoned trip is being planned to take place during the coming spring break.
Also approved was a $250 early resignation incentive for teachers. The incentive will apply if a resignation is tendered between January 27 and February 7 and is designed to allow WISD to post jobs sooner in the event that an educator decides to resign or retire.
Staff members of the month were as follows: elementary school teacher Shannon Painter; intermediate school teacher Maggi Massengale; middle school Dean of Students Jacquelynn Souder; and high school teacher and coach Joshua Sonen.
Students of the month were: elementary school student Emma Jones; intermediate school student Bo Kelley; middle school student Taraji Roy; and high school student Mason Pelham.
In honor of School Board Recognition Month, members of the board were presented with gift bags by WISD students. Southard said, “These guys put in a tremendous amount of work that you honestly don’t see a lot of the time, with absolutely no fanfare.
“Their hearts and souls go into this district, and we’re very fortunate and blessed that we have a school board that truly has a heart for these kids, a heart for our teachers and a heart for everyone who works here.”
Amy Teal gave a brief public comment in which she expressed concern about childcare in the event that WISD follows neighboring districts in implementing the four-day school week and suggested that the board maintain a more active presence on social media.
Enrollment at WISD stands at 1,434. Resigning or retiring were Vicki Reeves, Layna Philipp and Michael Neuman. Superintendent Southard’s contract was extended to June 30, 2028, and new hires were Lynnsey Bonner, Suzanne Bradham and Steven Slaughter.
The next board meeting will be held Monday, February 10, at 6 p.m. in the WISD Administration Board Room, located at 305 South San Jacinto Street.
