6:45 a.m. The generic iPhone ringtone that I have learned to hate goes off for a third time this morning. This is the worst part of the day. It takes ten minutes of battling my eyes’ urge to close themselves back up again before I can get out of bed and put on whatever clothes my dead fingers can grip. These strenuous mornings are the product of school starting far too early.
Gradually, I will emerge from this walking sleep and go about my day, which is unavoidably tainted by exhaustion
According to the National Sleep Foundation, teenagers need about nine and a quarter hours of sleep every night. For a Redwood student that takes an hour to wake up and get to school, he or she would need to go to bed at 9:45 p.m. to get the necessary amount of sleep.
Many adults who haven’t been in high school for quite some time would say there’s a “simple” solution to this – finish your homework early so that you can go to bed early. Well, duh, why didn’t we think of that?
But, it turns out the teenage brain doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t release melatonin, the hormone responsible for drowsiness, until about 11 p.m. The melatonin lingers until about 8 a.m., rendering the forced sleep time table unsuitable for teenagers
Psychologist and sleep expert Julie Boergers, Ph.D., conducted an experiment with the Bradley Hasbro Children’s Research Center on the effects of student sleep patterns, sleepiness, and mood if the school start time was pushed back twenty minutes.
After setting back the start time from 8:00 a.m. to 8:25 a.m., the results showed that the percentage of students getting more than eight hours of sleep per night jumped from 18 percent to 44 percent – a massive increase.
Boergers found that the early school start time could be very dangerous to teenagers.
“Sleep deprivation is an epidemic among adolescents, with potentially serious impacts on mental and physical health, safety, and learning,” Boergers said.
Schools should be trying their hardest to provide the most effective and positive learning environment possible. After our bodies are forced to wake up before they are naturally supposed to, we’re reprimanded when we slip into a nap during class for being disrespectful, even though our bodies are on their knees, begging us to give them a break. Pushing the school start time back and giving us more sleep would decrease the amount of students disrespectfully falling asleep in the classroom.
There are some valid arguments against starting school later, one of the biggest being that athletics and other extracurricular activities would be negatively affected by the change in schedule. Now, the fact that sports take precedence over academics is news to me. I’ve always been under the impression that academics were my number one priority over any sport, job, art, or any other various extracurricular school activity. But hey, maybe I’m wrong. I figured the reason we have a minimum G.P.A. for athletes is because academics are more important than sports in the end.
I understand that sports save some teens. They can be the reason many kids with poor grades are able to go on to higher education. But, in many cases, this means that the athlete is performing poorly in the classroom.
The average sleep-deprived athlete goes to school for seven hours, goes to practice after school for three, and then is expected to complete his homework after practice for the following school day. There is no way that, after school and practice, an athlete can be expected to be in bed by 9:45 p.m. so that he can be ready to wake up and do it all over again.
Student athletes are one of the biggest reasons why we should have a later school start time. They need the extra sleep more than anyone in the student body. Not only would it help them with their grades because they’d be able to focus more in class, but it would also improve their performance in a games and practices.
We can educate our youth in an immensely more effective, yet still extremely similar way to how our schools work now. Giving students more sleep is the most important change our schools can make to help improve students’ education and overall well-being. Sleep’s benefits are widely overlooked and ignored because it can be inconvenient and time consuming. If we start school earlier now, we’ll be grateful later.
