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A Study On the Effects of Early School Starting Times “They say the early bird catches the worm, but for teens in high school it would be better to catch some shut eye” says Kennedy is his article “Too Early to Rise.” School should start at a later time for the reason that students are not getting enough sleep to properly function in school. In this paper you will see the effects of not getting enough sleep has on students and what it does to their performance. Groups like the CDC (center for disease control and prevention) are urging schools to move back the start time of schools and let students sleep in longer. The CDC has found that two out of every three high school students fail to get sufficient sleep (8.5 to 9.5 hours a night). Teenagers biologically start to fall asleep up to two hours later around the time of puberty due to changes in their circadian rhythms. "Probably the ideal start time would be 9 o 'clock," said Judith Owens, lead author of the AAP policy statement and director of sleep medicine at Children 's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. "We know that the average adolescent is really challenged to fall asleep much before 11 p.m. because of changes in circadian biology," she noted. "We also know average adolescents need somewhere between 8½ and 9½ hours of sleep. So they 're probably best suited to wake up around 8 in the morning." But seldom do students actually get to wake up around 8. Most students have to be up around 6 in the morning in order to eat breakfast, get ready, and have enough time for transportation. Some researchers go even further. Paul Kelley, a sleep researcher at Oxford University in England, says 10 a.m. or later is the ideal start time for high schools. The AAP guidelines cite... ... middle of paper ... ... simple adjustment, but schools are finding it to be a challenge, especially if it brings additional costs. Different start times could interfere with students ' sports and club activities or after-school jobs, as well as with parent’s child care arrangements, and some argue that a later start would just encourage teens to stay up even later. The major obstacle for most districts, especially larger systems, is that starting times for schools are intertwined with transportation schedules for elementary, middle and high school students. Rearranging start times may disrupt carefully crafted bus schedules and raise the costs of getting students to and from school. But it 's hard for educators to ignore scientific data, and the effects of no sleep can have on students. Some school systems have taken steps to follow the recommendations, at least at the high school level.