What is a Minimum Day?

A minimum day is a shorter day that is often part of many schools’ school weeks. Shortening one school day is typically done because schools are legislated by their districts and their states to meet a certain amount of instruction minutes per week. This may leave the option for many schools to reduce hours on a single day and still meet that average.

There can be some advantages to having a minimum day for students, staff and faculty. Teachers can use the extra time to meet with parents, attend staff meetings, or to meet with students. Students may benefit from this model by getting to interact more closely with people not in their grade, with whom they still might be pursuing collaborative work. Alternately, many can just go home or head to after school care programs and complete their homework sooner.

School districts can vary as to how much time is shaved off the day to make it “minimum.” It all depends on the minute length of the rest of the school days, and it also can depend on the school grades. High school might have shorter instruction minute requirements than grammar schools, for example.

Calculation on this issue is extremely important. Failure to properly count minutes needed could mean schools would fall short of instruction hours they must meet over a year’s time. Such an event occurred in San Bernardino County in California, in 2009. Since the district failed to properly calculate minutes on minimum day, school children spend 34 more days in the classroom, not beginning their summer until the beginning of August, just a few weeks before instruction would again resume. The district, though sorry for the mistake, was in a bind because failing to meet instruction minute and day totals would have resulted in huge reductions in state support to each school.

Not all people are fans of the minimum day. Parents who arrange their schedules to pick up their kids at one time per week, may find it challenging to need a different arrangement for a single day each week. Kids may oppose parents in this respect, since any reduction in school time, of usually about an hour, may be looked on as a blessing and not a curse. Some propose ending minimum day schedule and reducing days of instruction instead. However just as there are minimum hour requirements per school week, there are also minimum day requirements per school year, so this arrangement isn’t always feasible.

Minimum day is typically viewed as different than final schedule days. When students tend to enter middle school and high school, they may have two to three days of finals at the termination of each semester. This allows for teachers to give more comprehensive tests that take longer for students to complete.