Rethinking School Start Times: Balancing Sleep and Education

Every day in the United States, students find themselves lying in bed struggling to get out of bed and prepare himself for the school day. Teenagers have spent too much time the night before on social media or watching netflix. However, current research from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that biological and physiological factors play a major role in determining how teenagers’ brains simply are not designed to sleep more than a few hours each night, and as a result, teens are sleepy and have trouble focusing on school work in their early morning classes, and they exhibit behavior issues and reckless driving. This issue is not an easy matter to resolve without facing some difficulties, but every problem requires some sacrifices to become feasible. The solution is complicated, but for the sake of safety and success, schools should change start times so that

If a student was a part of a team or club at their school, they would not be able to meet or practice until later in the day. The same goes for teens who have an afterschool job. Both issues would force teenagers to go home at a later time, which means that they have to stay up longer working on assignments due the following school day. According to Pannoni, some school districts will only alter the school starting time of their high schools, which causes families with multiple kids that attend more than one school to still wake up around the same time so their siblings are not late to school. Ultimately, any kind of schedule change would require students to shape their afterschool activities around it whether it means dropping a club or requesting less hours at their workplace. At first it may be difficult to get comfortable with this new schedule, however, just like any other routine, over time it will become integrated into their