Sleep Deprived High School Students

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The Struggles of Sleep Deprived High School Students On a typical day, there will always be at least one student, or more, with their head down on their desk. Sleeping in class is a pet peeve for some teachers. Some consider it as disrespectful, or simply wasting the teacher’s time. As students get older, they start to get more involved with after-school activities, as well as trying to maintain a nice grade point average since they know it’s crucial for college. The course work gets harder each year, which means that students would have to spend more time doing their homework or studying. Now imagine this: Your alarm screams 6 o'clock, and your eyes open at a squinting level. Knowing you have to be out of the house by 6:30 so you won't …show more content…

Fast forward to 2:00PM. Now you’re looking at an enormous amount of homework, and with limited amount of time to complete it, on your hands. With a job, a sport, or after-school activities, it restricts the student even more. The negotiation of arranging later school times, leads to safer, and better academic performances. For most high school students, it’s difficult waking up at around 6AM, coming home at around 10PM on certain school days due to a job or a sport, and still be productive enough to deal with homework, or studying for tests. Now you might be asking yourself, where does sleep even come in? This isn’t entirely the student’s fault however. Busy schedules including full days of school, after school activities, homework, and other things make it more difficult to attain the recommended amount of sleep. Lack of sleep is known as sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation affects several elements, such as leading to an impairment of learning, physical and mental health related issues, and negative impacts on athletic performance. Sleep deprivation won’t be solved within one good night of sleep. …show more content…

Once you change the starting time for school, it would cause a ripple effect to the events that proceed right after school. It could cause problems with transportation, as well as delaying after-school activities and sports. This affects coaches, as well as chaperones that help sports teams, along with less daylight hours to practice or have their games. All of the bus routes would have to change so that the buses can still pick up the high school students as well as elementary and middle school students. Some people would say teenagers should go to bed earlier if they are tired and need more sleep but these people do not understand how different an adolescent’s sleep cycle is. Even if students wanted to go to bed earlier it can prove challenging. Parents with children in elementary and/or middle school would have more difficulty in making sure their children get to school on time, as well as making sure they get to work on time. Traffic is generally light, so if schools were to push back at a later time, traffic would be an issue. If elementary school students switched times with the high school students, the kids would leave earlier and parents would still be at work, leaving them unsupervised. Elementary school kids aren’t ready to stay alone unsupervised yet, which would affect after school care. Due to everything else getting potentially put back, students probably return home later

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