Most students are familiar with the endless cycle of sleep deprivation. Staying up late finishing loads of homework, getting five hours of sleep and waking up at six the next morning. Schools seem not to care. Stanford Medicine describes sleep deprivation among teens as a current “epidemic.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that teenagers aged 13 to 18 should sleep at least 8-10 hours per day for good health. The number of teens that are getting such sleep is not nearly as high as it should be. According to an article from Healthline, “Research has found that 73%t of high school students regularly do not get a healthy amount of sleep.” The average amount of sleep teenagers get is around seven hours. The reason? Early school start times. The CDC finds that “93% of high schools and 83% of middle schools in the U.S. started before 8:30 a.m.”
Research also shows that teens who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to develop health risks. Some of these include obesity, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, using drugs, poor grades, anxiety and depression. The solution is not to blame teens and their parents for not encouraging strict bedtimes. It’s changing the start times themselves. Schools that start later in the morning, preferably after 8:30, have been becoming more popular in the U.S. and have seen a rise in student health and performance.
Most notably, California created a law “mandating the school day start no earlier than 8 a.m. for middle grades and 8:30 a.m. for high schoolers,” according to NPR. That’s nearly an hour after average school start times. De Leon 22 expands on this, stating that “now, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and the Virgin Islands legislators are now considering mandated school start time changes.”
Although there has been no direct research conducted on the effects of this new law on California’s students, Seattle high schools adopted this policy in 2016 and have seen several positive effects. Besides gaining a median increase of 34 minutes of sleep each night, Washington students improved their academic performance. According to the University of Washington, “final grades were 4.5% higher for students who took the class after school start times were pushed back compared with students who took the class when school started earlier. ”In addition, U.S. News states that “one study by the National Sleep Foundation found that both attendance and graduation rates significantly improved in schools that delayed their start times to 8:30 a.m. or later.” Studies also show that delayed school start times reduced the rates of car crashes and distracted driving rates, “which can reduce mortality and morbidity in adolescents.”
Inevitably, there are a few consequences that arise with later school times. Parents that drop off their kids before work will need to adjust, and students will have less time to participate in extracurricular activities after school. But all in all, decisions regarding school start times will greatly impact teenagers’ everyday lives, and that impact should not come at the cost of a student’s health.
Written by Noor Mahmoud of Thomas S. Wootton High School
Photo courtesy of Varun Srinivasan of Wheaton High School