The Ponder ISD school board recently voted unanimously to move to a four-day school week in 2025-26. Superintendent James Hill said the vote has already made phones ring with good news: Teachers on the job hunt are asking if there are positions open.
Hill said the district got just a handful of calls from teachers looking for work last year. Since the vote went public, though, Hill said the district has gotten about 30.
A number of Texas public school systems have dropped to a four-day work week over the last few years, including Sanger ISD, which approved the switch last year.
The reasons are economic. Instead of increasing the basic allotment that pays $6,165 per student, state lawmakers have opted to lock horns during the last legislative session over education savings accounts, commonly called vouchers, that would use up to $11,500 per student for families who want a break on private school tuition. The six years of stagnant school funding was compounded by inflation, which has left hundreds of Texas school districts funding their schools on deficit budgets.
State lawmakers also passed a budget that didn’t give teachers a pay raise in 2023, though the Legislature is in session and discussing teacher pay right now. But with soaring housing costs and climbing grocery prices, Texas teachers have seen their financial security slip. Many teachers can’t afford housing in the districts they serve.
For smaller districts like Ponder, this has been a recipe for teacher flight and a growing dry spell as administrators look to replace retiring teachers and younger teachers who have been lured to larger districts with better pay. In Ponder, the school district is the town’s biggest employer.
“Our attrition rate has been too high the last few years,” Hill said. “We’re losing teachers. We’re dealing with two things. One, there are much fewer teachers just in the candidate pool overall, across the nation, including Texas. And then two, we’re a very small school district in the middle of three very large ones that pay you much better than we can. In the last two years that I’ve been here, our attrition rate is one of the worst in the area. I’m not OK with that, because our kids are not going to get the education they need.”
“So we pay very competitively to other 3As, right? Because we’re surrounded by these other districts, I could live in Ponder and drive 15 minutes and make $10,000 more,” Hill said. “Argyle, Denton and Northwest will pay about $10,000 more. Actually, it was $15,000 when I got here, and we raised that.”
The Ponder school board has been working to make the district more attractive for teachers and approved an across-the-board $4,500 raise Hill lobbied for.
Elected leaders and Ponder administrators are preparing for growth. Right now, the district is a 3A district, meaning the district’s sole high school has up to 544 students enrolled. There is one middle school, but the growth is already showing in the elementary school, which now has kindergarten through third graders in one building, and fourth and fifth graders in another, in what the district calls the lower and upper elementary school campuses.
Ponder ISD spent the last year studying a four-day week that would run Monday through Thursday. They gathered stakeholders and finally shared a survey with families with children in the district, which showed overwhelming support. The district is planning child care options for working families that need child care on Fridays, though other districts who have adopted a four-day school week have reportedly seen demand for district-provided child care decline once the four-day schedule was established.
With housing developments on the way, Ponder ISD officials are bracing for a surge of students. Most of Hill’s career has been spent in fast-growth districts, so he took over the top spot at Ponder ready to lead the rural district into an expected population boom. He worked in Lewisville ISD when it was growing, then was the principal of Argyle High School for three years. After that, he took the executive director of human resources post at Frisco ISD.
He came to Ponder ISD about one year ago and immediately got to see the district’s plans for growth start to pay off. The district just opened a brand-new high school in August, and Hill is still proud of the state-of-the-art auditorium — with its professional fly system and industry-style lighting and audio booths — because it means the district will soon open its first-ever musical.
The change to a four-day week will go into effect at the end of October. The district plans for longer school days to reach the state-required 75,600 instructional minutes each school year, and the typical bad weather days are planned for Fridays after North Texas ushers out its final cold snap. Hill said the four-day school week means that students should expect rigorous classes without much at all in the way of downtime, and parents should expect to see teachers stay in their jobs longer and take advantage of planning and collaboration time with one another.
The board approved a four-day school week for three school years. Campus leaders will monitor student and teacher performance and then reevaluate the calendar. Hill said he expects that teachers will want to sustain the schedule, because they’ll be able to attend to personal business on a weekday.
“The way we approached this when we started planning is that, if we lose academic growth for the students, if we aren’t seeing performance improve or at least stay the same, we’ll end it,” Hill said. “We’ll go back to five days. But my research is telling me that the districts that do this — They see student growth.”