A public elementary school in New York City is offering 12-hour days in hopes of reversing its declining enrollment.
Longer school days have been proposed in other cities as a solution to the challenges created by an increased cost of living and discrepancy between the time children spend in the classroom and the average workday.
Brooklyn Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant embraced the idea of staying open 12 hours a day to address the needs of working parents and to retain enrollment at a time when many families are relocating to improve their cost of living. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the school’s enrollment shrank from 230 to 165 students.
“We thought, ‘We have to do something radical,’” Principal Joanne Hunt told The New York Times. “School hours aren’t made for working people.”
The program allows parents to drop their children off as early as 7 a.m. and pick them up by 7 p.m. at the latest. The school provides breakfast, lunch and dinner. Normal school classes and activities run from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. The program is offered at no additional cost to the families.
The Times notes that research credits after-school programs benefit students academically and emotionally and that longer school hours could prevent crime.
“Most juvenile crime occurs in the hours around dismissal,” wrote the outlet.
Extending school hours has been celebrated by advocates as a solution for working parents struggling to find childcare.
Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, proposed extending school days for elementary students from five hours and 45 minutes to seven hours. The daily addition of an hour and 15 minutes would have cumulatively added eight weeks of instructional time to the public school year. Emanuel also proposed stretching public high school days to 7.5 hours and giving teachers an extra 75 minutes a week to prepare.
The proposal was unpopular with the city’s teachers’ union.
Advocates for the proposal said altering the school day accommodates the challenges faced by the modern family.
“There are more two-income households, more single parents raising families, and more mothers in the paid labor force,” wrote Rhonda Present in an opinion piece for Education Week in 2011. “The days of June Cleaver waiting to greet the school bus each afternoon with a plate of warm cookies and a nice, cold glass of milk are pretty much over, assuming they ever existed at all.”
“The inextricable link between school schedules and family economic needs is firmly rooted in history,” Present added. “Countless studies have shown that children whose families are experiencing financial hardship are more likely to struggle academically. And, even if job loss hasn’t hit home, just knowing it’s a real possibility is negatively affecting student achievement.”
In a 2019 report for Fast Company, Leah Ruppanner, Stephanie Moller, and Liana C. Sayer argued that after-school childcare either burdens families financially or requires mothers not to work full-time.
“Childcare is among the largest expenses that gobble up U.S. family budgets. In New York City, it costs three times as much as tuition at an in-state public college or university,” they wrote. “We found that mothers are more likely to work part-time in communities where school days are shorter. As school days lengthen, the odds of mothers in that community working full-time rise.”
The researchers argued that keeping children in school longer benefits working moms by allowing them to stay at work.
