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You wake up with a start. What was that noise? The apocalypse? An alien invasion? The South African Avian Choir practicing outside your window?
Oops, never mind, it’s just your alarm. As much as you’d love to hit the snooze button, and you only have a short window of time before you have to leave the house. You swing your curtains wide open to let in some natural light, but it’s still dark outside. Even the sun thinks your morning routine is torture. After devouring your breakfast, washing your face, and brushing your teeth and hair in record time, you try your best to get some extra sleep on the ride to school despite all those pesky speed bumps. Only to repeat the cycle for 180 days of the year.
There you have it, an average student morning routine. And although my description had some added dramatic flair, countless studies have shown that early school start times are more than a minor inconvenience to students. We’re not designed to begin learning at 7:40. In fact, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and American Academy of Pediatrics both recommend that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m.
You’ve probably heard it before: Teenagers need around 8 to 10 hours of beauty sleep each night. And you might think, well, if school starts early then you just need to go to bed earlier, right? Unfortunately, adolescents experience a phenomenon called “phase delay” in which their internal clocks are wired to go to bed and wake up later in the day. In fact, many teenagers’ biological clocks don’t allow them to fall asleep before 11 p.m. Consider the average high school start time in the United States: 8 a.m. Unsurprisingly, 70% of American high schoolers aren’t getting enough sleep, and keep in mind that the school day at AISJ starts 20 minutes earlier.
Consequences of sleep deprivation include poor academic performance, an increased reliance on caffeine to get through the day, and long-term issues such as anxiety, depression, and heart disease. So what can we do to protect our teenagers’ health?
Well, several experiments with later school start times have shown positive effects on students’ performance and sleep schedules. For instance, in 2016, Seattle Public Schools shifted their high schools’ opening time from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. and made the elementary school start times earlier. Although some might have expected the high schoolers to start going to bed even later, the University of Washington and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies saw a median increase of 34 minutes of sleep among teens from two high schools – from six hours and fifty minutes per night to seven hours and 24 minutes.
Another study at an English state-funded high school, which was conducted over a period of four years with a group of students through the ages of 13 to 16, exhibited a similar trend. In the first year, the school start time was 8:50 a.m., which was shifted to 10 a.m. for the next two years and back to 8:50 for the last one. The study saw measurable benefits, including a 50% decrease in student illness over 2 years, which then increased by 30% in the last year when the earlier start time was reimplemented.
AISJ’s school day starts over an hour earlier than this study’s original start time – so imagine all the potential benefits of changing it.
Starting later has plenty of additional advantages, including enough time for students to eat a healthy breakfast and minimized tardiness. But what are the arguments against it? In the United States, later start times have often conflicted with bus schedules, where high schoolers are picked up first, and elementary schoolers are picked up last. However, AISJ doesn’t have a separate upper and lower school. Then there’s the argument that high schoolers would take advantage of the later start time to go to bed later, but it’s been proven in experiments that students see an increase in sleep when start times are shifted. Another potential issue is that students may have less time to complete their homework in the evening, they may have less time for sports and other extracurricular activities, and there may be more traffic and overcrowding on buses. However, studies have shown that many school districts in the United States who changed their start times continued to see achievement among students in sports and academics.
All in all, the research is clear: Later school start times, specifically after 8:30 have significant benefits for teenagers’ mental and physical health, as well as their academic and extracurricular performance. Students don’t need any more lectures about the recommended hours of sleep from adolescents, and we don’t need more pitying comments from parents and teachers about our early wake-up time – we need concrete change.
