My school district switched to a 4-day school week. It's been a game changer for teachers, who were previously leaving our schools in droves.

• Gregg Klinginsmith, a Missouri superintendent, switched his district to a 4-day school week in 2019.

• The district nixed a day in an effort to keep teachers from leaving for better pay in bigger cities.

• Both students and teachers love the new schedule, and teacher retention is up after four years.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gregg Klinginsmith, the superintendent of Warren County R-III School District in Warrenton, Missouri, about his experience overseeing the district's switch from a five-day school week to a four-day school week in 2019. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

We've elected to develop our calendar on a four-day school week. Every Monday is a day off for our staff and our students, which has really helped our community with consistency.

Kids in our school district go to school from 7:45 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. We're in our fourth year of this; this is my fifth year as superintendent.

We are on the outskirts of suburban St. Louis and have about 3,000 kids. We have three elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. We're the first rural community outside of the suburban school districts. We have lots of farms in the area. We're definitely not a rich district.

One of the reasons we went to the four-day school week was because our neighboring districts in the large suburban areas paid a lot more than ours and we were facing a tremendous amount of teacher turnover.

We can't offer teachers more money, but we can offer them time.

Our starting pay is $36,941. The State of Missouri has a grant that allows us to give anybody making less than $38,000 a grant. So our teachers receive a package of $38,000 plus benefits.

Our base teacher pay has not changed in six years, and teachers can make about $20,000 more a year working in the suburban districts, which are only about 10 miles from us.

About 20% of our teachers left us each year because we had nothing to offer them except low pay.

I've been researching student achievement for a long, long time. I've been studying this very closely, and I know that the teacher in the classroom is key to student success. So whatever we can do to keep and maintain quality teachers in our school district is going to have a positive effect on our community.

We had to come up with something we could bargain with. We can't compete in pay, but we can give them time.

Time is what we're now using to retain our staff. The main focus is trying to provide the best working conditions for our staff.

At the same time, we hoped the schedule would help us see better student attendance. Knowing that kids wouldn't have to come to school as often meant we might actually see better attendance.

The same thing with discipline — if they're not here as much, they won't get in as much trouble.

We conducted a lot of research before making the switch.

There were about 60 districts in Missouri ahead of us that had gone to the four-day week, and they all had similar stories.

We have a good relationship with our school board, and everyone was brainstorming retention ideas. As a group, we decided that this schedule made sense for our community.

We were lucky to have a neighboring district that had been doing this schedule for about five or six years before we jumped on. They gave us a lot of information about how we could do it.

We did a tremendous amount of research. We studied for multiple years to determine what impacted student achievement because that was something we were really concerned about.

One of the things we saw that really did not impact student achievement was the total number of days that kids go to school.

Currently, in the state of Missouri, every school district is required to do 1,044 hours. You can structure your calendar however you like. There is a required start date from the state, but after that, it's really up to the local school districts and communities to determine how they want to get those 1,044 hours in.

We approved the new schedule in January 2019, and about half a year later, school resumed in August with four-day school weeks.