Each of Utah’s 29 counties offers unique advantages for businesses and talent alike. Let’s visit Piute County.
Economic development is inseparable from quality of life. The more money businesses make, the more tax dollars are allocated to local schools, parks, roads and general infrastructure. The more money businesses make, the more locals make working at the business, and the more non-local professionals move into the area to work and spend money. A town grows and becomes a hub that provides not only living essentials but also luxuries to residents. For Piute County, the start of the economic development chain is its school system; specifically, the weekly schedule.
Piute County School District shifted to a four-day school week beginning in the 2023-2024 school year. The decision has often been framed as an education policy decision, but local leaders see it differently. For them, it is a workforce strategy designed to protect instructional time, support working families and adapt schooling to the economic needs of a rural county.
Geography decides
Piute County is not close to much of anything. A dentist appointment, medical visit or grocery run can require a 40-minute to hour-long drive. Locals often bundle several errands into one trip because of the distance involved. For students, that travel reality translated into frequent, full-day absences from school for basic needs and school-sponsored sporting events.
“Attendance on Fridays was a huge problem for us,” Shauna Bagley, principal of Piute High School, says. “For all of our extracurricular activities, … you have to travel quite a distance to play other teams.”
When sports teams travel for state tournaments, non-athlete students also travel to support and cheer on players. With only around 130 students in grades seven through twelve, those who didn’t travel to show support would skip school as well, knowing there would be minimal instruction that day.
“When you don’t have half of the kids in your class, it’s hard to move on,” Bagley says. Over time, low Friday attendance created a cycle: fewer students showed up because little new instruction could reasonably take place.
An attendance problem
Piute County School District Superintendent Koby Willis says the current four-day week emerged from a close look at how Friday school days were actually being used. When he and his wife — both teachers — realized they had not taught their senior classes on Fridays for weeks due to absences, the district began analyzing attendance data.
“There was just so much instruction time lost on those Fridays, and that was just making it a very unproductive school day,” Willis says. “It started us down the rabbit hole of research.”
Willis notes that the Piute County School District had previously run its high schools on a 4-day school week until the state phased out the practice from all districts in the early 2000s. While looking into solutions for the district’s attendance issue, he rediscovered why the unique schedule worked well for the area and that several schools in Utah had been approved by the state board of education to return to the practice.
The key metric required by the Utah State Board of Education is 990 hours of instruction per year. To meet the requirement while also eliminating an inefficient day, the district lengthened Monday-through-Thursday instructional days.
From initial conversations to final approval, Willis says the process took one school year. During that year, the school board and Willis held several meetings, hosted public town halls, and sent out surveys to parents and students to gather input on the decision.
“In urban districts, you’d have to worry about what happens to thousands of kids on Fridays. We don’t have those same variables.”
— Koby Willis
“The public gave us a lot of good comments on how to make it better, more efficient. We believe the benefits of a four-day school week aren’t just about if you do it, it’s really in how you do it,” Willis says. “There are a lot of ways to do it wrong, and so I feel like we got a lot of good feedback on ways to make it better and more effective.”
Aligning education with rural labor patterns
In Piute County, the school district is the largest employer. If parents aren’t working in education, they likely work in agriculture. The workforce spread heavily affected the implementation of the four-day school week. Initially, many community members were concerned that having no school on Fridays would negatively impact the local workforce. The concern wasn’t necessary.
“When [the schools are] not working on Fridays, [parents] can be home with their kids,” Bagley says. For other families, older students at home can help care for younger siblings or contribute directly to farm and ranch work.
Willis says Fridays have really become a meaningful extension of the local workforce pipeline. Many Piute students are enrolled in work-based learning programs, and the additional full day provided by a shorter school week allows them to meet employer expectations without missing any instructional time.
“We have a pretty heavy proportion of our high schoolers who work while they’re going to school,” he continues. “[The four-day school week] just allowed them to add another day and have two full days of work on a Friday and Saturday.”
To maximize efficiency, the district paired the four-day school week with a block schedule, allowing students to take more career and technical education courses and pursue clearer pathways aligned with local economic needs.
“We are able to offer so many more classes because of the block schedule,” Assistant Principal and school counselor Eric Jessen says. “CTE and pathways have been a big emphasis, and additional classes have been able to be added.”
Recruiting talent to rural Utah
The four-day school week has also become a competitive advantage in teacher recruitment and retention — a critical economic development factor in rural communities.
“It’s hard to recruit people to live in Piute County if they don’t already have ties here,” Bagley says. When the district hired a new language arts teacher last year, the four-day schedule was a significant selling point.
Teacher turnover remains low, and staff report reduced burnout. “They come back on Mondays refreshed and ready to work,” Bagley says, a factor that reduces costly turnover and supports long-term community stability.
Stable outcomes, broader benefits
Academically, student performance remains stable through the transition. “We’re performing at the same level we were on a five-day week,” Jessen says. While national research on four-day school weeks shows mixed academic results, Piute County’s data shows that community input and careful design can prevent negative results.
With the new schedule, Bagley says the high school has specifically campaigned for students to get more involved in the community or extracurricular activities, ensuring they stay engaged and connected beyond the classroom. The district has seen 97 percent of students join a group.
Willis is clear that Piute County’s model is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Research shows four-day school weeks are overwhelmingly rural, where distances are greater, economies are family-based and communities are tightly interconnected.
“In urban districts, you’d have to worry about what happens to thousands of kids on Fridays,” Willis says. “We don’t have those same variables.”
In Piute County, the four-day school week operates more as an infrastructure adjustment than a perk, aligning education with the county’s economic realities.
For a rural community competing for talent, supporting working families and maximizing limited resources, Piute County’s approach suggests that education policy can double as an economic development strategy when it is designed with local conditions in mind.