I've never been a big fan of four-day work weeks or school weeks in an effort to save energy. Their advocates just seem to ignore the fact that these workers and kids wind up doing something else that day, and are as likely to consume more energy than less.

For example, how many parents who put their kids on a bus M-Th now have to drive them to a day care on Friday? How much extra energy does the day care have to expend? What about the teens? Are they driving somewhere on their extra day off? The same is true for a four-day work week. I highly doubt people stay at home that extra day and sit in the cold dark. At least in my experience, adding an extra day to my weekend results in more travel, more money spent, and more energy consumed.

For the most part, these four day schedules are nothing more than a re-shuffling of the energy-consumption deck, not energy savers. We should be basing the length of the school day on what works best with respect to education, not minor differences in energy used.

Chad is correct. This is just moving the energy cost around. Likely to smaller buildings with lower efficiency per capita (like keeping the heat on at home all day). Furthermore if the same number of hours of instruction are kept 20% is a bogus figure as each other day would need to be longer.

School hours should be based (as Chad points out) on what works for education.

Finally, what the heck are parents with strained budgets supposed to do for child care during the other day?

I seriously doubt any comprehensive study would find an overall decrease in energy usage for such a program and it risks things like quality of education and child neglect. Not a worthy tradeoff.

One school, properly insulated, thermostats set at a comfortable temperature, fluorescent lights, etc., must surely be far more energy efficient than all those kids at their homes with the heat and lights on. Take computers as an example. My school has about 100 computers total (counting the lab and classroom computers). Those 100 computers serve all 600 students. If those 600 were at home, at least half of them might be on a computer or watching a tv. So, 300 vs 100.
It might save the *school* money on energy, but the cost is transferred to the families.

I think of it terms similar to the argument about electric lawn mowers. Yes, perhaps the electricity generated is coming from a coal-fired plant. But 1000 people using electric mowers produces less pollution at the power plant than 1000 people all using their own little gasoline engine.

The reason? Emission controls and standards are much higher at power plants than your one cylinder mower. We've all spilled gas when filling in, know to mix oil in to burn, see the clouds of smoke that come out, etc. A coal plant produces less!

1000 kids at home will consume more energy than 1000 kids in a single building, where resources can be shared.

Surely someone has made these studies and there is proof one way or the other?

Do any of the previous posters have references for their claims?

Does an electric lawnmower really produce less carbon (from the source to the end use) than a gas one?
Does everyone turn down their thermostats during the day when the kids aren't home?
Does everyone turn off their home computers when they are not in use?
How many families have 2 working parents and kids young enough to force them to use daycare?
How many more, or expanded, daycare facilities would be required to deal with the increase in kids on Fridays?
What would the energy increase be from those new or expanded facilities?
What would the effect be if companies also switched to a 4 day week?

My point is this: Reducing a community's carbon emissions is complicated. I am a huge believer in Keep it Simple but unfortunately this is not a simple endeavor.

Having said that, tho' I suggest this simple first step to communities, school systems, and homeowners:
Put all your efforts and available cash into improving the efficiency of everything that produces carbon. It is the simplest and most effective first step that everyone can do. This will start reducing carbon NOW while scientists and policy makers/deciders figure out the next most effective step.

It really is a great idea though there are drawbacks and though the net energy savings may not be that significant. The State is broke and I think this could be one fairly easy to implement way of getting back some dough.
Since I've been in college (3 1/2 years) I have only once taken classes on a Friday, and it was a disaster (Freshman mistake). I learned however that hardly anyone does take classes on Fridays at this level anyway so there is all that wasted energy of the whole campus operating listlessly.
My commute to school is near 50 miles round trip so I save a significant amount of fuel in keeping it to a 4 day week.
I graduate in December and will be looking for jobs that hopefully by then are looking for the 10 hr 4 day week as well.
Maybe by then we can get this all sorted out!
Great post, I'm all for it.

We do extensive bussing in Florida. Going to a 4 day school week would cut consumption of diesel fuel by 20%, which equates to hundreds of millions of dollars statewide. The carbon savings is enormous and it would be nice to let the children have a complete day of goofing off before getting in to the weekend homework grind.

One of the points made in Gladwell's recent book, Outliers, is that poorer groups in society benefit incredibly by more time in schools. The theory is that students from wealthier families tend to do lots of extracurricular activities, supported by their parents, that continue the learning process out of the classroom, while that is much less true for poorer families, and there is lots of data to back this up.

So there is a huge unintended consequence of this program that increases the already large class gap in the US. Surely there are other ways to save money on energy in schools (solar panels on roofs, CFLs, etc.) that don't gyp the kids.

Why not reduce parents' work weeks to 4 days/week as well? If it doesn't work from a corporate closure aspect (i.e. business must stay open on Fridays), why not job share? Keeps more people employed, gives parents that day off with their children.

The compressed work week (9/80, 4 10s, etc.) only improves traffic congestion. It is obvious in the LA area that traffic is lighter on Fridays, but only during the rush hours. My experience working a 9/80 schedule was that I put on more miles (running errands) on my Friday off than I did on a regular workday. The extended workday cuts into your after work errand time, so you have to do your errands on Friday (and make a special trip for them, rather than do them on the way home.) It would be interesting to see if people working a 4 day work week actually reduced their annual mileage.

The compressed workweek may have benefits in an office environment, but it cannot work in any 24/7 environment. My experence was that support staff (day staff) still had to cover the 24/7 workforce. Our technical staff was on a 9/80 schedule with half the staff off each Friday. Maintanence was on 4 10s with the weekend skeleton crew covering Fridays. The hotel load for the facility did not vary much on Fridays because most of the lights were still on. When breakdowns occur that cannot be covered by the reduced Friday staff, extra people are called out from home.

The compressed work week may improve quality of life for those who live close to work, but if you have a commute greater than half an hour, that extra one or two hours Monday through Thursday make for a long day away from home. Where I was working, there were people living in motorhomes during the week and then they went home on weekends.

As far as schools are concerned, I think it would be hard to accomodate an additional two hours of classwork Monday-Friday. Sports and performing arts already require two to four hours afterschool attendance. I suspect that extra curricular activities would be curtailed in a four day school week.

I do not believe that a 4 day work week would reduce overall energy consumption for two reasons. The first has already been mentioned; namely that if the lights aren't on at the office they will be on at home. The second is that unless the work week is strickly enforced (don't ask me how) people will still go in to work on their days off. This happened quite often at my facility. People work late or come in on their days off to improve their stature or to make their life easier (such as avoid rush hour or work in a more quiet office) but because one person in the office uses almost as much energy as the complete staff.

The last thing is that the compressed work week does not improve productivity by eliminating Fridays, it just moves the Friday afternoon slowdown to Thursday. Anyone leaving early on Friday to get a jumpstart on their weekend, leaves early on Thursday.

I agree with Chad. Most people (kids, teens parents) would use the extra day off at school to do something that would waste more energy. How about keep the school on for 5th day and add a 2-3 hour long class on environment for each grade? That would help in solving the problem for the long term.

As a teacher, I can imagine that fitting in all of those classes you would otherwise miss on Fridays into the rest of the schedule would be a bit of a logistical nightmare for schools.

Also, think of the kids. Surely those hours have to be made up somewhere. I'm not so sure making them stay longer so they have 6 extra hours (or more) spread across the 4 days would make for time spent productively.

Plus, 180 school days per year more or less is a standard across most of the States. Does that mean the school year is stretched out in order to make up those days lost on Fridays? If that's the case, then a measure like that won't save any energy at all.

Why not get the post office to deliver one day less? The gas saved would be quiet significant.

I grew up with a four day school week. It wasn't until I got to college that I went to school M-F. It's hard to say for me how this affects other families, since my mom was stay-at-home and just watched us on Fridays. Once we were old enough, we played sports on Fridays. At that point, my parents were both working, so my mom would just drop us off at the beginning of the day, so there was no extra drive time for our sports. We started school I think around 8 and went until 4 pm. It did help some families not have to worry about what to do with their kids from the time school got out to the time they got home from work, since it was much closer. Anyway, I can say that growing up this way, the five day week always seemed really weird to me. I'm sure there's some growing pains moving to this system, but it worked quite well for us. Later, surrounding schools studied our system as a way to cut costs.

I have a wonderful idea that really doesn't have anything to do with buildings closing, but it does pertain to an energy savings.
How about if we don't allow airplanes to fly one day a week (perhaps Sunday). Just think of the energy saved there, not to mention the non-pollution that would occur on that single day. Sounds crazy?