Independence School District is the largest in Missouri to go through the change. An extra 35 minutes will be added to each day to comply with state requirements for instructional time, Superintendent Dale Herl told the news outlet.

The district will offer child care on Mondays for $30 a day to assist parents who require it.

“If they weren’t using any care, well, certainly, that could be a potential cost that they otherwise would not have,” Herl noted.

In Missouri, around 25% of schools moved to the new schedule during the 2022 academic year, according to a brief by the National Conference of State Legislatures. 

The state is far from an exception, with nearly 900 school districts nationwide on a four-day weekly schedule. It has been a rising trend in recent years. In 2020, 650 districts were concerned. In 2023, the number rose to include 876 districts across 26 states, the outlet found.

This scheduling change is being made to recruit educators amid a national teacher shortage. As a result, schools are receiving noticeably more applications.

“The number of teaching applications that we’ve received have gone up more than fourfold,” Herl said. 

Officials in Chico, Texas, agree. They say that positions that used to receive five applications suddenly received over 20 after they shifted to 4-day school weeks.

There are at least 36,500 teacher vacancies across the country, according to estimates communicated to USA Today by Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor of education at Kansas State University. Around 163,000 positions are held by underqualified teachers.

As a result of the shortage, some schools have been hiring underqualified educators.

“If you’re underqualified, students tend to do worse on achievement tests, and they tend not to learn the content at the same level as they would if they had a better-qualified teacher,” Ed Fuller, an associate professor in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State’s College of Education, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “It limits the opportunity of those children going forward in terms of going to college or choosing a college major.”

Schools moving to a 4-day week is a shift that needs to be evaluated to see the academic impact on children. Some experts believe other solutions should be explored to tackle the current teacher shortage.

“The best way is to pay them better,” Columbia University’s Teachers College professor Aaron Pallas told CBS News. He added that Missouri teacher salaries are among the country’s lowest.

The teacher shortage, though, is an issue occurring nationwide.