District to cash in on 4-day summer work week

The Port Washington-Saukville School Board last week approved a four-day summer work week for district employees that promises to save tens of thousands of dollars in energy costs.

The relative handful of full-time employees who work during the summer — primarily administrators and administrative assistants — will work 10-hour days Mondays through Thursdays from early June through August. All schools and the District Office will be closed on Fridays during the summer, which means the district will not have to cool them.

The work schedule will not affect summer school, which runs Mondays through Thursdays.

The district estimates that closing buildings on Fridays in summer will save $58,000 annually, and additional measures such as minimizing energy use at the three schools that don’t host summer programs could bring the savings up to $100,000.

The change comes as the district faces a projected $1.2 million deficit next school year and a recent study shows the district has high utility costs compared to other area school systems.

Of the costs in six school districts surveyed, the Port Washington-Saukville School District’s utility cost per student of $408 was nearly twice as high as the $209 cost in Cedarburg, $127 higher than in Grafton and lower only than the $430 per student in Whitefish Bay. 

“Looking at being fiscally responsible and what other districts are doing to balance budgets, one thing we have come across is a way to do that with energy efficiencies,” Supt. Michael McMahon said. “The savings speak for themselves when we’re thinking about how to deal with the deficit we face.”

McMahon, the former director of teaching and learning in the Grafton School District, said several school districts have four-day summer work weeks.

“Grafton has done this for years, so we’re not doing anything new here,” he said.

When asked by School Board member Elisa Pioneck about the potential pitfalls of the summer schedule, McMahon said, “I think working 10 hours (a day) if they don’t want to start their day at 7 a.m. and work until 5 p.m. could be a challenge.”

He said the district may be open to the idea of staff members working some hours on Friday mornings if they don’t mind working without air conditioning.

Giving them that option “is something I’ve seen in other districts, knowing that when we turn the air conditioning off on Thursdays at 5 p.m. those facilities will still be cool the next morning, but we wouldn’t be cooling buildings on Fridays.”

District has 282 open enrollment seats

In other business, the School Board approved a plan to open a total of 282 seats in Port-Saukville schools to non-resident students who would use the state’s open enrollment program to attend classes in the district next school year.

The plan is based on the available capacity at each grade level and applies only to general education seats. The district has no space for special education open enrollment students.

The greatest number of seats — 159 — are available at the district’s three elementary schools. There are 46 seats open at Thomas Jefferson Middle School and 77 at Port Washington High School.

The state’s open enrollment application period began this week and runs through April.

The program, which allows students to attend schools outside the school district where they live, is particularly important to the Port-Saukville School District because it is experiencing significant declining enrollment and has more students using open enrollment to leave the district than come to it.