<p>"Sending them to bed earlier does not help if Mother Nature has wired the majority of teenage brains to resist sleep until later in the evening. "</p>
<p>more like lax parenting from the start…</p>
<p>As I said, the research is nicely compiled at schoolstarttime.org. The National Sleep Foundation also has a backgrounder on this issue ([Backgrounder:</a> Later School Start Times | National Sleep Foundation - Information on Sleep Health and Safety](<a href=“http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/hot-topics/backgrounder-later-school-start-times]Backgrounder:”>How Would Later School Start Times Affect Sleep? | Sleep Foundation) ) , but the schoolstarttime.org website brings that up to date. A lot of the best research in this area has come out of the University of Minnesota and Brown University…</p>
<p>What is the job of schools? It is not to provide cheap labor in the afternoon for businesses or accommodate sports schedules. It is to educate in a safe and healthy environment. If scientific research shows that teens have a basic need to be asleep at 6:30 am, then why does society force them to be at the bus stop at that time? I talked with a mom the other day who sees high school kids walking to school on a road without a sidewalk or shoulder in the dark every morning. Will it take a tragedy making national headlines to bring this issue the attention it deserves? And what about the majority of teens who don’t play sports? Should they have to arrive at school pre-dawn for the athletes? How about the students who are barely hanging in there? Do they need another reason to quit? Don’t we have enough dropouts already? The United States Conference of Mayors cites early high school start times as a contributing factor in gang involvement. Guess what? Kids getting out of school at 2 pm, largely unsupervised, is part of the problem. For those who choose to blame the parents why not give our kids a better chance in spite of their parents? Thank goodness many school districts have changed their hours because they get it.</p>
<p>I couldn’t agree more with misbehavin. I’m shocked at how many people here are blaming kids for laziness and/or the parents for laxity. It’s like blaming someone overweight for lack of willpower, blaming the victim. The research on this subject is now overwhelming that early school hours are out of sync with the biological clocks of adolescents–and everytime you turn around there’s another study showing how early start times are associated with everything from car accidents to truancy to weight gain to depression. Besides, why are we so defensive about these hours? Schools didn’t always start at 7. Most people I know work from about 9-5, for that matter, plus or minus depending on the type of job. I’m confused as to where this idea about 7 am being the norm got started. I guess I’m a dinosaur, but when I went to high school in the 1970s, we started at about 8:45 and got out around 3. Teens had jobs, did sports, extracurriculars, homework, even went to Ivy League schools. They also had time for breakfast with the family and to help a little around the house. My kids certainly don’t have time for that. My son eats breakfast in literally one minute–if he eats it at all, to catch a 6:30 a.m. bus. A lot of other kids I know suffer from serious health problems related to sleep deprivation that only became apparent when they went off to college. Parents in my community are extremely concerned about all this, so I’m surprised at the level of discussion here because CC is generally a fairly enlightened community. It seems like everyone’s defending the status quo without considering that virtually no one who’s informed on this topic thinks it’s good for schools to start so early. The question is only how we dig ourselves out of this hole.</p>
<p>What are the chances that earthmother, misbehavin, and earth are all the same person? I’d say pretty good. Not that what “they” are saying sounds all that unreasonable. If I’d had to start that early when I was in high school – especially since it took me an hour to get to school on the bus and subway – I probably would never have graduated! (If I recall correctly, our school day began at 8:30 am and ended at 4:05 pm.)</p>
<p>NO to federal mandates, the government shouldn’t micromanage this. They have enough trouble trying to manage a “no child left behind” policy, I can imagine the costly disaster and worsening of education. Here there is a 7:30 start, with finish by 3 pm. It will get dark around 4+ pm soon. It is not only athletics that goes on after school- all sorts of academic clubs do. Ideally teens should follow their circadian rhythms, but it isn’t all that easy to do so. Biggest time problem I see for local HS students is the 3 lunch periods- some eat so early/late it can be hard to get through the school day.</p>
<p>Ha, DonnaL, could be–especially since at least two of our names are so similar (although that would have been kind of a bad move if the “three” of us wanted to disguise ourselves). I can’t speak for the others, but I assure you I am my own woman, usually a lurker on CC but occasionally irked enough to speak publicly. Anyway, thanks for making me at least feel like i"m not nuts. I really don’t think most people my age went to school at the crazy hours my kids do, and, as I said, I think this is a huge problem. Glad to see it being discussed.</p>
<p>My Ds attend private school so federal mandates, bus schedules and school boards are not an issue. The school tried an experiment a few years ago of moving the start time half an hour later for the winter trimester. The result was higher grades, fewer visits to the health center (equivalent to absences in PS) and even higher scores in athletic contests. The change was made permanent the next year. Just a data point.</p>
<p>In theory, I agree that our teens would do better with later start times. Objectively, it would be simple to flip the HS 7:25 start with the elementary 9:25 start, while leaving the middle school 8:25 start alone. It wouldn’t be any costlier, no more busses needed, just a schedule change.</p>
<p>However, and I’d like to hear a reasoned response to this, that puts our tiny students at our bus stop at 6:45, which is pitch dark for months during the winter. This is dangerous enough for our teens, but a deal breaker, I think, for the parents of elementary ( or middle school, if you want to put them in the early start time slot) age students. </p>
<p>In addition, the sheer number of activities that take place in our high school and on it’s grounds after our 2:20 release has to be taken into account. Rather than only speaking to the circadian rhythm sleep needs of teens, any plan to change the start times really has to address these issues. Again, for our particular high school, it does come down to safety issues. Our high school has a limited campus. It is old, and because of it’s location, can not be expanded. Spring and fall sports teams already do not have enough practice space on campus. Some teams practice on a nearby, unlighted community park. Practices are limited to daylight hours. I understand that sports and extracurricular activities are secondary to academics, but any plan to change high school hours is going to have to address these issues. </p>
<p>So, OP, taking into account dark bus stops, unlit sports fields, and the extracurricular issues brought up by other posters, what, specifically would be your plan to switch school hours while also addressing these issues? I have yet to ever read a fully reasoned plan that addresses all of the ways in which our high schools are used from 7:25AM through the end of drama, band, sports, clubs and community use that often keeps parts of our building in use past 10PM.</p>
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<p>I’m only a college student but the exact same thing was done to my high school this year (we have separate bus routes from most public schools because we are a magnet school so this may have been why). I keep in contact with some teachers and they say that many teachers like it and see less tardies and better test scores than years before. It may be a coincidence but with the positive feedback I think it’s a good sign.</p>
<p>On top of that, I had to be at my bus stop at 6:10 every morning. School started at 7. The first three years of my high school consisted of: serious sleep deprivation, falling asleep everywhere - in class, on the bus (missing my bus stop quite a few times), in the car, during tests/quizzes, and I recall once when I was driving to the market at about 5pm.</p>
<p>Senior year I began driving to school. Instead of waking up at around 5:15-5:30, I woke up around 6:15. I have to admit that falling asleep in places became WAY less of a problem even though I consistently kept the same sleep schedule throughout all my years. That hour of waking up made all the difference in my life.</p>
<p>We have one of those dreaded 7:20am start times, and my kids get on the bus at 6:15am. On nights they have a lot of homework, a late activity, or have procrastinated they don’t get much sleep. Our neighboring county went to a later start time several years ago. Here’s what my observations have been. </p>
<p>Many activities that used to be after school clubs now meet before school. The official bell may be at 8:30 for example, but the kids have to be there several days a week for club activities that used to meet after school. There are no ‘early busses’ that act as the late bus or activity bus many kids take advantage of after school so unless you can get a ride in early with a friend or parent you can no longer participate in clubs that now meet before school. Sports and other after school ECs that have long hours are just pushed back and the kids are getting home even later, still the same amount of hw to be done, so the bedtime is simply shifted later. There is no additional sleep. That student is simply going to bed at 1am as opposed to midnight on a busy night.</p>
<p>I’m not opposed to what the majority decides in any area. I thought I’d share what I have seen regarding activities shifted earlier in the day to before school ECs. I am not in favor of Federally mandated laws in this area. </p>
<p>FWIW, my kids have always been fully able to go to sleep before 11pm because they were dog tired from being awake all week at 5am. The researchers didn’t ask us. 
There is also research about needing time away from electronics before we can sleep (internet, fb, texting). We ‘cut the cord’ at 10pm when our kids are in hs.</p>
<p>Not only would changing school times affect the schools and bus drivers and adminstrators but it would affect every single students life as well and that may not necessarily be all postive things. </p>
<p>I usually get up around 5am every morning. Yes, some days im tired but there are 24 hours in a day and if you plan efficiently, you can accomplish everything you need to and still have time to get a full nights rest, refreshed for mornings. As soon as i get out of school i have practice cfrom 2 to 5 then DE from 6 to 8 then I go home and do homework for next few hours. The way i look at it; if i go to bed by 11-12pm then I can at least get 5 to 6 hours asleep.</p>
<p>Thats just a typical day for me. I never get home before 8 on a good day. If school times change my whole life and schedule would too. Practice, DE classes, Work times, my volunteer hours. Everything would be pushed back…is that really worth an extra possible hour of sleep?</p>
<p>No Thanks.</p>
<p>Sent from my PG06100 using CC App</p>
<p>So, msbehavin, earth, and earthmother, could you address the safety issues that I brought up in post #30? If you are concerned about your teens walking on dark country roads, who do you suggest takes their place? I’m not talking about a single private school, or a single magnet school, but a large, county wide school system that is comprised of 40 elementary schools, 19 middle schools and 12 high schools. Somebody has to take that early start time…or do you think that we should start the high school at 8, middle schools at 9, and elementary schools at 10? That would get the elementary kids released at 6PM, instead of the present 4PM. Hmmmmm… Wonder how many kindergarten parents are going to go for a 6:25 evening bus stop?</p>
<p>I grew up in a place where the buses picked up by neighborhood, regardless of age. All kids were picked up, elementary was dropped off first, then off to the middle and high schools. That way the little ones were not standing alone in the dark on country roads (and they were dark gravel roads where I was from). Now the buses come first for high school, back fo middle school and again for grade school. at no time are these buses full. It could be that by changing the bus program we could handle eastcoastcrazy’s concerns.
To me this is a local issue and no unfunded mandate would be appropriate, but I do think that this should be discussed with local school boards.</p>
<p>Great discussion! I like the points made by misbehavin… what is the job of our education system? Is it to provide cheap labor or make it convenient for sports teams to practice for 3-4 hours every day after school? </p>
<p>Blaming the parents is fine until you accept the fact that not all parents are great parents and there are many high school kids who are basically raising themselves in our communities. They are the kids we need to look out for as well. There are kids who don’t get regular meals at home. It’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure that they can receive the best education available and have the best chance of graduating from high school. Our local school is throwing tons of time and money at closing the ‘achievement gap’ between different student groups. Maybe if all kids had a chance at a good night’s sleep, all kids could succeed equally in academics. Maybe that disruptive kid in your child’s class would settle down.</p>
<p>Please look at the science (earthmother’s posts)- it’s overwhelmingly clear that the current schedule is harmful to all students. One recent study shows that chronic sleep deprivation is linked to permanent damage of the developing teenage brain. Brain development continues into our 20s (something scientists didn’t know back when we were in high school). Let’s try and benefit from this emerging understanding and create a school system where our kids have the best possible learning environment we can give them.</p>
<p>Some high school students may look like they’re managing fine with the early start time, but even they might be less stressed, more successful, and healthier in the long run with a change in school start time.</p>
<p>Eastcoascrazy-Not ignoring you, and you ask excellent questions. Some of them, I think, have been answered by others on this forum. One primary rationale for requesting a bottom line limit of 8 a.m., by the way, was your point about the elementary school kids. Many local school systems have come to realize it would be better for high schools to start later, but, as you say, the only affordable way they think they can do it is to flip times–and then the little kids would be going to school in the dark. Frankly, I think it’s just as horrifying to have 16-year-old girls waiting on dark corners at 6 a.m., but that’s another discussion. Teenagers are children, too, not to mention human beings…But, anyway, the real answer is that there are as many solutions as there are local school systems. What would work in a large county school system is unlikely work in a system with a single high school. </p>
<p>Setting a minimum start time of 8 a.m. is simply a matter of public health and safety as I see it. The federal government already mandates that school lunch be served between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Local schools work out the details, but this just prevents abuse and lets schools do what’s in the kids’ best interests when they work out the details rather than succumbing to other interests. Most schools in the most of the world–and in this country until quite recently–started after 8. This business of pre-sunrise hours is new and unnecessary, and now that we know what it’s doing to our kids, we need to address it. It’s also an equity issue, as some other posters have observed. If you have means, you choose a private school with hours that work for your kid–or at least you drive them or get them a car so they can sleep in a bit longer. For the less fortunate, there is no choice, at the expense of their health, safety, and academic future.</p>
<p>So, more money to pay for pre-school care before 8am for those who work.<br>
From my prespective, it is much easier to control when kids go to bed. If they start 7am, then they have to go to bed 1 hours earlier than if they start at 8am. Pretty straight forward, subtact 1 hour or add 1 hour, everybody can do it instead of forcing families to pay more either in fees or in taxes.</p>
<p>Our district’s bus transportation costs are already huge. As an example, the same bus covers approximately the same neighborhood bus stops 3 times every morning, and 3 times every afternoon. The bus is full on its elementary route, full on its middle school route, and usually less than full on its high school route, but that is because some high schoolers may choose to drive themselves. The buses have to be run on the assumption, however, that the kids assigned to them will ride them, and if everyone did on a given day, that bus would be full as well.</p>
<p>We don’t have buses that are running with room to spare. So to condense the school times, the numbers of buses would have to increase a LOT. Our single bus stop would take an entire bus (some years it would take more than one bus) by itself, if the three pick up times were condensed. Our transportation costs would increase astronomically. Where is that money going to come from? In a time of decreasing education budgets due to decreasing property taxes, increasing the transportation budget isn’t going to happen, even in our wealthy district. So what would happen, realistically, is that bus service would be discontinued. (We already have no bus service for walkers who live within a half mile of school, and can safely walk there on sidewalks.)</p>
<p>We live 2 miles from each of our 3 assigned schools, some of that distance has sidewalks, but part of it doesn’t. Kids would be walking the curb along a major 4 lane, 40 MPH road, or parents would be driving. Are you serving the needs of the families who rely on bus service if you change the start time, but require families to provide their own transportation?</p>
<p>I’m really not trying to be argumentative about this issue. In fact, as I’ve stated, I agree with the theory that our teens really need later start times. I’ve had this discussion with people who live in my area, and these are the issues that crop up. I’m presenting my district’s issues to you, and asking you to give me a reasoned response, not just a blanket statement that we need to work it out. The devil is in the details.</p>
<p>Please don’t ask me to support a federal mandate that we know will come with no funding unless the real world consequenses of that mandate can be realistically addressed ahead of time.</p>
<p>MiamiDAP</p>
<p>You seem to be under the impression that it’s a self-discipline issue. Kids who have to wake up earlier, need to go to be earlier. Period. This is a common when talking about issues of sleep, but it’s also incorrect.</p>
<p>There is a huge biological element to this. Most teens can’t just “go to bed an hour earlier,” anymore than you could fall asleep if someone put you into bed at 10:30am and told you to. It’s not that they don’t have the discipline to turn off the TV/computer/whatever (though some don’t), it’s that biologically, teens do not get tired until around 11 or 12pm.</p>
<p>There’s a large body of data out there on this, but the bottom line is that if you try and sleep at hours that your circadian clock isn’t primed for, you don’t sleep or you don’t sleep well. This is the reason there is such a high incidence of sleep disorders, poor sleep and lack of sleep in shiftworkers who work outside the day shift. For an adult, and for young children, their body starts to wind down in the evening. Hormones fall in orchestrated rhythms that prepare the body for sleep so that when it’s time for bed, you’re tired and ready to get there.</p>
<p>With the onset of puberty, teens typically experience a circadian phase shift. They experience a burst of wakefulness in the evening, which delays the time that their body starts to wind down for the evening. So even if you put them in bed and removed all distractions, they’d generally be tossing and turning until around 11:30pm, when their hormone levels are at a place where they can fall asleep (this is true statistically for broad swaths of the teenage population - individuals, as always, may vary). Teens are both primed hormonally to fall asleep later (melatonin, the so-called “sleep hormone” is shifted so that its elevation comes a couple hours later in the night for teens than it does for adults) and wake up later (cortisol, the so-called “stress hormone” which signals your body to wake up and get ready for the day, is also shifted forward in time from the standard “adult” circadian clock in a teen). This has been demonstrated in a broad range of scientific studies.</p>
<p>So it’s not a matter of “make your kids go to bed earlier.” For many, they can’t. For me, it is very akin to the federal mandates that lunch be served between 10am and 2pm, even if schedule wise, a school district might find it much easier to serve everyone at 930am or 3pm. We recognize that there are biological consequences to not giving kids a meal at a time their bodies are primed to need one, resulting in less engagement and ultimately, poorer learners.</p>
<p>To make full use of capital resources in a school system, for example, it would be GREAT tp use a single school building and have high schoolers go to school from 5am-1pm, middle schoolers from 1pm-9pm and elementary schoolers from 9pm-5am. That really would take advantage of the system and keep costs low. It’s absurd, however, because biologically, that’s not how humans are set up. We should recognize on a federal level that sleep is a key driver in performance and health and establish some baselines so that students in our schools get an appropriate amount (which will lead to more engaged and active students). The individual and school-specific details beyond the baselines can be worked out by individual districts, but the baselines for school start time are not fundamentally dissimilar from baselines for school lunchtimes. In both cases, the federal government would be recognizing a baseline point at which it would be healthy for students to do X, and requiring that districts at least adhere to that baseline.</p>
<p>2plus2,
I am way to old to believe that parents are not there to inforce what needs to be inforced. Yes, if parent does not inforce, then kids will not go to bed, if it is inforced, then they will go, period. Even when they are very busy every single evening and even if they have huge homework assignments every single evening. Done both ways, one was out of control on purpose, another was under control on purpose. Self discipline is not applicable, it has to be learnt before they go to college. As a parent you can choose to teach or not. I hav chosen no in one case and yes in another.</p>