School Starting Time is Unhealthy

Opinion

School Starting Time is Unhealthy

Stephanie Lepsik - January 14, 2010

Schools that start too early are causing students to get dangerously small amount of sleep.

For many students the hardest part of the day is waking up in the morning to go to school. Waking up early is not only very difficult but also incredibly unhealthy. Many teenagers are not getting enough sleep to be healthy and productive.

With school starting so early, students lose a large amount of sleep from waking up so early in the morning. Some schools start as early as 7 in the morning and others start anywhere in between 7 and 8:30. With school starting this early it is almost impossible to get a healthy amount of sleep.

Although most people need only about 8 hours of sleep a night, studies show that teenagers need around 9 or 10 hours. With school the time that it is, students would have to go to sleep around 8:00-9:00 to get enough sleep. This is unrealistic for several reasons.

Students have very busy schedules; they have sports, homework, friends, and a variety of extracurricular activities. These activities can last for several hours and students sometimes don’t get home until after 9:00.

Also even if students wanted to go to sleep at 8:00, they would have a very difficult time falling asleep because of certain hormone levels. During puberty there is a two hour shift in melatonin levels. Melatonin is a hormone that tells the body when it should be sleeping and when it should wake up.

Because of the shift, teenagers’ bodies are telling them to go to sleep and wake up later. This is why it is nearly impossible to fall asleep before 10:00 or 11:00.

If students aren’t getting to bed until 11:00 or sometimes much later, this gives them less than 7 hours of sleep. This lack of sleep is incredibly detrimental to a teenager’s health.

This lack of sleep causes difficulty staying awake and paying attention in class, difficulty learning, thinking, making decisions, using good judgment or solving problems, moodiness and irritability, problems with memory, growth, the immune system, and general health, delayed reaction times, sluggishness and decreased motivation, using bad behavior to counteract daytime sleepiness (examples include eating sugary, fast energy foods; drinking too much caffeine and smoking). These effects are not only bad for students academically, they can also be very dangerous.

If schools started later, around 8:30, 9:00, or even 9:30, these effects would go down an exceedingly large amount. This would lead to happier, safer, and more awake teenagers.

There are schools that have already made the decision to start school later. For example, a high school in Minneapolis Minnesota switched their start time from 7:15 to 8:40. The results were immediate and obvious.

One teacher reported that “students were noticeably more alert in the first two periods of the day, the cafeteria was calmer, and there were fewer fights in the halls. Students who were now getting nearly an hour more sleep each night, said they felt less depressed. They were raising their hands instead of falling asleep at their desks. Even parents thought their kids were easier to live with”.

These were just the immediate effects. Over time even more results started to show. A private school in New England that had switched their school time from 8:00 to 8:30 reported that the class attendance improved along with students’ grades, and more kids stayed in school and didn’t drop out.

Students that were interviewed said that even though the time changed by only 30 minutes, students felt so good from every extra bit of sleep, they started going to bed earlier, and got even more sleep. This led to even better moods and grades.

Schools all over the country have begun to try the new system of starting school later and all of them have found positive results. Sleep specialists agree that starting later is the only way that makes sense and should be done in all schools.

Information in this story is from the Las Angeles Times, The Sleep Education Foundation, and TeensHealth.com