LIKE good principals everywhere, Janet Liddle tries to keep up on the activities of every one of the 197 students at Granby Elementary School in Colorado, in the United States. From Monday through Thursday that’s fairly easy, but Fridays are tough. “Well, about half of them will be on the ski slopes on a Friday,’’ Liddle says. “A bunch might be at a concert, and some of them just take off somewhere with their parents.’’
The student body disperses every Friday because Granby Elementary, on a snowy plateau at the headwaters of the Colorado River, has a four-day school week. With the economic downturn and stiff new limits on state and federal education budgets, other districts, particularly in the rural West, are following suit, shutting down one day a week to cut costs.
