Why We Should Start Later In High School

As a result of a changing body and mind, adolescent sleep cycles have different needs than those of adults or younger children. As a matter of fact, Biologically, sleep patterns shift toward later times for both sleeping and waking during adolescence -- meaning it is natural to not be able to fall asleep before 11:00 pm (“Teens”). In addition to biological change in sleep patterns, teenagers also tend to have eccentric sleep cycles. Obtaining less than healthy hours of sleep during the school week and then catching up on their sleep on the weekends. Most teenagers during the school week, do not get the suggested amount of sleep. In fact, according to a recent poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, 80% of teenagers do not get the suggested amount of sleep of 9 hours on school nights (“School Start”). With changing bodies and minds, along with an increased amount of schoolwork and extracurricular activities, teenagers need more sleep than children of a younger age. Experts believe that moving back the start time of school for high school students will improve grades, test scores, and the overall health and personality of many students.

Having a later school start time can increase a student’s academic grades and awareness. Thirty-three percent of teens say that they fell asleep in class. Even though this is a small portion of teens, falling asleep in class shouldn’t even happen once. Also, this means they are getting less than what they need,(eight to nine hours of sleep a night). A school needs to pack as much teaching time as they can in a day, but if that means waking up a student at a time so early, then there's no point.When a student doesn’t sleep as much, students are not aware as they would be if they had a good night’s rest. If students had this sleep, the would pay more attention in class. Therefor, a student would have better grades.

The primary reason for attending school is for adolescents to get an education in hopes of getting a good job.  Attendance, test scores, and GPA’s all play an important role in a student’s success in school, and if they can all be improved by pushing the start time back, then this issue should be pushed further.  The root problem of students not performing to their full potential has to do with the inability to focus from drowsiness in class due to the lack of sleep they are getting.  To support this point, Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and his team, “found that students showed up for morning classes seriously sleep-deprived and that the 7:20 a.m. start time required them to be awake during hours that ran contrary to their internal clocks” (Richmond).  In other words, Carskadon believes that current high school start times go against teens’ natural sleep patterns, making them be awake at a time where their bodies aren’t ready to get up yet.  This causes concentration issues making paying attention in class harder, and kids not getting the best grades they can.  Also, sleep won’t get any

Have you ever been really tired when you wake up for school in the morning? Sleep is very important to all teens, or it should be. Young adults should have 8.5-9.25 hours of sleep every night, according to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), in Sarah McKibben’s article “Wake Up Calls”. Unfortunately, two-thirds of teens are getting less than 7 hours of sleep each night, according to the NSF’s chart. This is causing a large number of schools and scientists to think that schools should start later in the morning. I fiercely disagree with this. Schools should not start later because starting later for high schools would cause too many negative consequences.

High school students should have a later starting time in school due to students not getting the amount of sleep they need to function. Students that stay up late at night are way too tired to learn when they get to school early in the morning. Most students who do stay up late are unable to sleep due to melatonin not yet being produced. This shows that starting school at a later time would have many positive benefits. These benefits include higher test scores, increased attendance, more participation from students, and higher performance from athletes.

To conclude, we can see how not only does more sleep make us prepared and more focused for the school day, but how it also affects our positive sleeping patterns, our ability to learn, and the amount of stress that our bodies receive. We see how many liable resources were used to conclude that sleep truly is one of the most important factors in a student's everyday life and supports the idea that school should begin later for the most positive results. Starting school later will truly minimize bad sleep patterns and habits, increase the amount of learning and lastly, put less stress on our minds and

There are many learning benefits when students start school later. The research, conducted by a sleep expert with Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, R.I., found that a delay in school start time of only 30 minutes was associated with significant improvements in adolescent alertness, mood and health( 1 ). The more sleep we get we can learn more and it would be better. The more

and Mary Carskadon, Ph.D. surveyed more than 3,000 high school students. They found that those who reported poor grades (C, D or F) reported getting 25 fewer minutes of sleep than the students who reported getting A’s and B’s. The poor performers also went to bed approximately 40 minutes later than the students who reported getting good grades. A study from the University of Minnesota confirmed that later school start times can have a positive effect on academic performance. Investigators studied two school districts that changed their start times to 8:30 a.m. and 8:40 a.m. When compared with students attending schools with earlier start times, the students reported getting higher grades. They also had fewer depressive feelings, got more sleep on school nights and had less daytime

It is very clear that most people resent the thought of waking up early in the morning to get school or work. Right? According to the author Elenam112,  “It has been scientifically proven that teenagers are not morning people. They have a biological tendency to stay up at night and sleep later in the morning.” (TI.)  I strongly agree. In my opinion, I believe school start times should start at least an hour or two earlier, due to the health benefits also, students will be much more focused in class. This could change our society for the better, the proof is in the people keep reading to understand why sleep is so crucial to our body’s and furthermore,our minds..

Significant facts exist that confirm that school start times are too early. The amount of sleep children get is a key factor to how they do in school. Energy is a huge necessity for kids and teens to concentrate during the school day. If students aren’t concentrating in class because they are sleep deprived, they are missing crucial information that they need to get good, or even average test grades. With early wakeup times, it makes it very challenging for students to get the ideal amount of sleep to do well in school. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend for kids to get at least 8.5-9.5 hours of good sleep. The AAP warned that sleep deprivation can "threaten academic success,

John Cage once said, “Sleep's what we need. It produces an emptiness in us into which sooner or later energies flow”(goodreads.com). There is currently debate over whether the high school day should start later; the supporters argue it would allow teenagers to get more sleep. Reality currently sees high schoolers staying up late to complete homework and participate in afterschool responsibilities, mostly due to adolescent sleep patterns: staying up late and waking up late. The change would force many teens to stay awake longer. High schools should not start their day later because pushing back the starting time would decrease the availability of after-school activities and would require an extensive reworking to the transportation schedule.

Research has shown that teenagers experience a charge in their internal sleep clocks so that waking up early and going to sleep early are difficult. Should high schools begin later in the day and end later in the day to accommodate students’ natural sleep clocks? This has been a long debate, between politicians and scientists, to change school hours, for the students, to get better sleep. The original hours and set up for schools were to train students to work in factories during the industrial era of the United States. I think school hours should be changed because students will be more productive, students’ stress levels will decrease, and students will have time to sleep properly.

On average in today’s society most teens don’t like going to school that early in the morning. To have to wake up so early when they only get about seven hours of sleep, to have students be coming into school at 7:30AM or maybe even earlier in some other schools, is not right. Students need to have time at night to get work done, not only schoolwork but also non-schoolwork. Needless to say, the school schedule for high school students needs to be changed and be made where they go in later. That way they get their work done and get enough sleep because without much sleep students will not be getting high grades. A health survey that the University Health Center administered showed them that one in four students say that lack of sleep has

Later classes lead to better grades. Students who said they got poor grades reported getting twenty-five minutes less sleep a night and going to bed an average forty minutes later than kids with good grades did. Cognitive function and psychomotor skills are closely related to sleep, and numerous studies have correlated sleep loss with significant decreases in children and adolescents’ performance (Wolfson 1). Studies of middle school and high school students reported that more sleep, earlier bedtimes, later weekday rise times, and less daytime sleepiness were associated with better grades in school and greater motivation to do one’s best in school (Wolfson 2).

High school involves a lot of beneficial aspects including providing education to kids to prepare them for college, providing a social environment, and creating a structured schedule. Although, studies are showing that there is one aspect of high school that could be hurting students, more than helping; the start time is too early. Many states in the U.S. are catching onto how harmful it is for students to have a lack of sleep, and only recently are changes being made. Lack of sleep can lead to obesity, depression, car accidents and an overall lower quality of life (Richmond). All high schools need to be making the change to a later start time to give these students the rest they need.