Update 03/12/2024:

On March 7, a day after this story was published, the New Mexico Public Education Department announced it was rolling back the four-day school week. The rule change requires schools to offer at least 180 days of instruction per year — and operate five days a week — unless they can demonstrate sufficient advancement in reading and language arts. The new rule will take effect July 1, 2024.

Harding County, the least populous in New Mexico, is the home of the Mosquero Municipal School District — one of the smallest in the state — with only 45 in-person students. Almost all of them are ranch kids who’ve learned to juggle homework with daily chores and who travel long distances — some more than an hour each way —  to go to school in Mosquero, a village of some 98 people.

The sun is still just a thin orange glow on the horizon at 6 a.m. when district school buses begin collecting the children of New Mexico’s most rural county and delivering them to Mosquero’s combined elementary school and high school campus. From pre-kindergarten through high school, the kids put in four days a week at school, which starts at 7:45 a.m. and ends at 4 p.m. — a little over an hour longer than typical five-days-a-week schools. They get home in the evening and do chores on the sprawling ranches that make up the majority of Harding County, a landscape of plains and mesas in the state’s northeast corner.

“On the weekends we learn stuff about, like, real life. We feed cows, we break ice, we fix leaks, we move cattle, we sometimes have to pull calves during calving season,” said Gabriel Flowers, a high school senior. Flowers and his brother Joseph, a junior, help their parents manage the 16,000-acre family ranch near Mills, 29 miles northwest of Mosquero. The brothers wake at 5:45 a.m. and take care of the horses and any cows in the corral before driving to school, returning as late as 6:30 in the evening.

Forty-seven out of the 129 school districts in New Mexico use a four-day schedule, according to the state’s Public Education Department. But a proposed rule change by the PED threatens to upend this way of life. It would mandate that schools statewide adopt a five-day school week for at least half the year, if not all of it. Agency officials say the change is necessary to accelerate learning, pointing to a RAND Corp. study that found student achievement grew slightly slower at four-day schools.

Across New Mexico, “three-quarters of our students are not proficient in math, and about two-thirds are not proficient in reading, so we need to increase instructional time,” said former PED spokesperson Nate Williams. Studies show that the longer hours at four-day schools aren’t as effective as adding more days to the calendar, he added.

Nearly 900 school districts across 25 states have shifted to four-day school weeks, a trend that increased during the pandemic, according to Paul Thompson, a researcher at Oregon State University who specializes in the topic. The PED’s decision about whether to curtail four-day weeks — joining Missouri in pushing back on the practice — is still pending. The agency is still considering the more than 1,000 comments people submitted to protest the proposed change.

Families and teachers in the Mosquero District are adamantly opposed to adding the extra day. They point to the challenges they face in Harding County, a place with a population density of only .3 people per square mile and over 30 times more cattle than residents. To keep enrollment at a sustainable level, the district also offers all-virtual classes, designed for kids who participate in the rodeo circuit or live too far away for daily attendance; 53 students are enrolled.

Recruiting teachers and staff to work at a rural school can be challenging, and the flexibility of a four-day week helps draw in teachers who would otherwise go elsewhere, said Superintendent Johnna Bruhn. Indeed, Bruhn estimates that as many as half of the district’s full-time staff would leave for other jobs or retire if the five-day rule change goes into effect.

Compounding the problem in a district that doesn’t have the kids to lose, the added travel time would tempt some parents to pull their children out of school. Try Knotwell, the manager of the 300,000-acre Bell Ranch, said his kids will “definitely be homeschooled” if the five-day proposal goes through, even though it would mean “they don’t have the friendship and camaraderie of it, which is important in rural America.” Knotwell already drives 40 minutes to get his kids to and from Mosquero; adding an extra day would be too much of a burden.

When it comes to the PED plan, Caitlin Ward, a Harding County rancher and mother of two, summed things up this way: “We’re hoping that they come to their senses.”

A day in the life: Harding County students, from dawn to dusk