Hey this has some good negative and afferimative!!!!!!! And a kittle of special ed. kids

AUGUSTA -- A four-day school week offers cash-strapped school districts the potential for savings but might harm special-needs students and school employees.
That's the message the Legislature's Education Committee heard Monday as school officials, a union official and a parent spoke on a bill that would allow districts more scheduling leeway.
The bill's sponsor, Rep. Sawin Millett, R-Waterford, said discussion about four-day school weeks picked up during the fall months of 2008 when heating oil prices increased to more than $4 per gallon.
While those prices have dropped, he said, school districts must still contend with cuts in aid from the state.
"There is going to be enormous pressure on school officials to be creative," said Millett, a former education commissioner. "This is just one tool, an arrow in the quiver, for them to think outside the box."
The bill would not impose a four-day week as the sole option for an alternative schedule.
Current law sets the school year's length at 175 days of instruction. Millett's bill would allow districts to offer an equivalent amount of instruction over a different time span.
Mark Eastman, superintendent of Oxford-based School Administrative District 17, said the scheduling alternative would work well in large, rural districts with high student transportation costs.
"In this mandate for consolidation, we're creating more large, rural school districts," Eastman said. "So I think that will broaden the appeal (of the bill)."
William Shuttleworth, superintendent of Bath-based Regional School Unit 1, estimated a district could save 4 percent of its budget instituting a four-day week.
"I don't take that lightly," he said.
The savings would come from eliminating or reducing student transportation one day a week and shutting down building operations an extra day, saving on heating costs.
The switch to a four-day week could also reduce some employees' hours and cut into their wages as a result, said Joe Stupak, director of collective bargaining research at the Maine Education Association, the state's teachers' union.
A bill allowing alternative school schedules could also provide for school system employees and their bargaining representatives to be involved in a district's scheduling decision, Stupak said.
Heidi Bowden, of Augusta, said a four-day school week would not work well for her daughter, who has autism. She worries that her daughter could not handle longer school days, and that she would struggle to readjust to school after three-day weekends.
"The alternative to you saving some money means my daughter has to suffer," Bowden told legislators.
"There are a lot of unanswered questions about this," Shuttleworth, the Bath superintendent, acknowledged.
A four-day week could complicate child-care arrangements and scheduling of athletic and extracurricular events, the superintendents agreed. And students could benefit from longer periods of instruction in some subjects while losing out from one day less of instruction in others, they said.
"Those problems will be addressed locally, where they belong," said Rep. Thomas Watson, D-Bath.
Discussions about four-day weeks are not new in Maine or elsewhere in the United States.
Seventeen states currently allow alternatives to five-day school schedules, Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron told legislators.
In the 1970s, a Waldo County school district piloted the four-day week in an effort to save money.
Matthew Stone --legislative panel debates pros and cons of a 4-day school week 1/27/08