Should School Start Later Essay

Don't you hate waking up early in the morning? On school days, students are waking up around six o'clock in the morning just to get ready for school. The average start time for a school in the U.S. is just shy of eight o’clock (Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). It's just too early for teenage minds to work at full power. Schools should start at least an hour later than that. With the extra hour, student’s health and attendance to classes would improve, as well as their grades and attitudes, and it would be just as good for teens as for the teachers and other staff members. School should start later to both increase attendance rates but to also work out better students and staff.

DId you know that Teens are recommended to have eight to nine hours of sleep every night (startschoollater.net)? However only a third of teens get any more than seven hours of sleep on any given school night (The Wake Up Call). Being sleep deprived is definitely not good for a teen who is walking to school and any that are on the road driving. Being sleepy can have similar effects as alcohol, leaving you to take more risky discussion and not having good judgement. And to make up for the loss of sleep,

kids sometimes just doze off in the middle of class. According to “The National Center for Education Statistics” a third of students admit to dozing off in the middle of a class everyday due to not enough sleep. As long as school starts at about eight this will keep happening. Since school starts so early and leaves kids studying late at night, it causes them to doze off, which we don’t want to happen especially while behind the wheel.
“Sleep is the most effective cognitive enhancer we have.”-Russell Foster The Director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at University of Oxford. Sleep has been known to act as a cognitive because the way it reacts with your body. Sleep serves to make your memory stronger throughout any learning process (The Wake Up Call). With more sleep, brings along better memory and better memory of school. So why force students to study late at night and wake up at around six? With more time in the morning, students can refresh knowledge simply by getting more sleep. In Minnesota’s Edina School District, they decided to accept the change in the start time of their high school from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Within a year the principle of the school found drastic changes in attitudes among the students. The principal reported fewer disciplinary reports given out in the halls and lunchroom. The students also reported less depression and stress. In addition over 92% of the parents said their kids were easier to live with. Since those statistics were gathered, eight other schools participated in the same test with similar outcomes. In conclusion the later school start time can and has created better environments for schools, and improving in grades and attitude of students.
Lastly, later start times can not only help students, but their family’s and their community as a whole. Later start time can help students, of course by giving them more sleep, keeping them well-rested. However it can also help their parents by having them not be late to class as much. Another way it would help their parents is with later start times brings later end time. This would give it more of a chance to have their parents be home by the time their kids get home. This would be especially good if the kids going to school were not old enough to watch themselves. However this also brings up some reasons why school shouldn’t start later. One of them would be it would push back after-school activities like sports. This would cause kids who are involved in them to arrive home later. However even if school is pushed back it still gives plenty of time to have practice and do all the other stuff they do at home. Lastly it would help the community as a whole because it would help the whole flow as a city. Since school will start later, there will be less traffic from kids being picked up from school for people coming home from work. It would lower the traffic, especially for rush hour. In conclusion a later start time would not only help students but everyone else in the community.
In conclusion later school start time can improve everyone in a community not just the students.

Students feel sleepy almost everyday waking up around six in the morning just to be put behind a desk for hours. In addition to this, brings along students being tired which makes sense because a third of students admit to falling asleep on any school day. So why don't we start later? With the extra hour, attendance rates would go up along with the health of the students, as well as their grades and attitudes, and it would be just as good for teens as for the staff of the schools. Students aren’t at their full potential when they are sleep deprived. Hundreds of school have already changed their start times till later and has shown positives of it, so why shouldn't every school start

later.