By BARBARA GREEN
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Two more Montague County school districts will be moving to the four-day school week this year with teacher retention and recruitment the driving forces for this change.
Gold-Burg and Montague Independent School Districts join Prairie Valley ISD, which enters its second year of the four-day week. While other county districts have not formally gone to four-days, they are all using different methods to get a shorter week in some fashion while still getting the required 75,600 minutes for students.
Bowie has been releasing early on Wednesdays for several years, and Nocona has been releasing at noon Fridays. Forestburg also has a similar schedule releasing about one hour earlier on Fridays.
Rural school districts in Texas have been switching to the four-day week in the last couple of years, and now some larger districts are giving it a try including Mineral Wells ISD which has about 3,000 students.
National teacher organizations say the shortage in staff has hit crisis levels, and while there is no database to track this information local and regional educators gathering for training in the last few weeks have all shared stories of needing teachers at all levels.
Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a convergence of different factors starting with the pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and a growing lack of respect for their profession across the board from parents and politicians to their own school’s boards.

Read the full story in the mid-week Bowie News.