Why We Should Start Later In School

In “High Schools Starting Later to Help Sleepy Teens” by Michelle Trudeau and “High Schools Will Keep Starting Too Early.Here’s why.” by Dan Weissman they both have their own perspectives on life about school starting times and the problems they may bring to the students of high schools.In Michelle Trudeau’s story she says that the starting times for high schools has many students still very drowsy and tired most of the time having them nod off during school instruction.She states that in an average high school 20% of students fall asleep in class on a typical day.Therefore, in need to prevent this from happening teens need more sleep as opposed to them not getting enough sleep from either staying up late or period as some experts say.There are many ways to add additional support for teens and their sleep.

Research has shown that teenagers experience a change in their internal sleep clocks so that waking up early and going to sleep early are difficult. I agree with the decision to change school times and what it has to offer. This would not only help the teenagers with many things but also accommodate the parents schedules too. I believe that if the school system were to alter the times so that High Schoolers were to wake up later then it would fix various conflicts; teen depression, lack of awareness, and it allows parents to work later.

How many times has this happened to you; it’s six thirty on a Tuesday morning, your alarm has already gone off twice, your still laying in bed and your bus comes in twenty minutes. This is an everyday occurrence at my house. It is a proven statistic that the average high school student does not get enough sleep. While some experts like Dr. Lee Yanku say “It is not the schools starting time that is the problem as to why students don’t get enough sleep, it is because of facebook, myspace and cell phones” The truth behind it is that we can’t budget sports, homework and extracurricular activities into one day and still get nine hours of sleep. This is hurting student’s academic averages and needs to change. Changing the school time will help

The drowsiness of adolescents contributes to over 100,000 crashes per year. Students being drowsy is from being sleep deprived from the early school start times and that is one of the reasons why they get no sleep. Schools shouldn’t be starting early in the morning because it affects adolescents mental and physical health, their academic performance and it doesn’t let them get the recommended amount of sleep.

In the first place, students are not getting enough sleep. In the article “Should School Start later” by Lisa M. Herrington [20] “According to the National Sleep Foundation “59% of 6th-8th graders and 87% of high schoolers aren't getting the sleep they require”. This quote shows that students are not getting the sleep they need. And kids must wake up early how are they getting the sleep we need. “So why don’t kids just go to sleep earlier? It’s not that simple” Says Danny Lewin, a sleep specialist at Children's National Health system in Washington, D.C. “Adolescents have a deeply programmed biological clock to go to bed later and wake later” Says

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

One reason why high school start times should be pushed back is because of teenage body clocks. The body clock of a teenager is completely different than those of an adult or young child. The reason behind this is melatonin. Melatonin is a sleep- inducing hormone that naturally tells the body when you need to sleep. Research shows that teenagers normally do not start producing melatonin until late at night; usually around 11 p.m. Also, research shows that teenagers do not stop producing melatonin until 8 a.m., which is normally when their first class of the day begins. Since

Still, advocates [those in favor] say studies show the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. In 1996, high school

Students are not getting enough sleep. There is either homework or after school activities keeping kids from getting the right amount of sleep they need. The author states that, most kids are going to bed at 10 p.m. or later on school nights, even though they have to get up early the next day. Changes can be made at school to adjust to students’ sleep patterns. Some ways schools can adjust to students’ sleep patterns is shifting the time to start later, giving less homework or less after school programs, schools could also end sooner.

After reading both passages, I believe that both authors agreed to the idea of starting high schools later. In the passages "High Schools Starting Later to Help Sleepy Teens "and "High School Will Keep Starting Too Early both implied the fact that teens need a lot of rest. Here's why, they both stated facts on how they believed schools should consider starting earlier. As the first author decided to use facts about why high schoolers should enter later, the second author stated the reasons why high schools could not be delayed. In the first passage the author expressed on how students stay on task more frequently and doze off less if school started later.

First, school times should be pushed back to later start times because students will not be sleep deprived. Many teenagers are not getting enough sleep and this is due to early school start times. A National Sleep Foundation Poll reported 28% of teenagers fall asleep at least once a week during first hour of school due to their lack of sleep. This means that

If a survey was given out to 100 students on what they hate most about school, some would say they do not like the lunches, or how long the classes were. The majority of the students who took this survey would say that school start times needed to be later in the morning. Around the age of sixteen, students start to get jobs, and start driving which equal a ton of late work nights and loads of stress trying to figure out how not to die while driving with their parents. If a working student gets off at their grocery store job at 9:30, this student is probably not going to fully get ready to go to sleep until 11:00. If this student gets up for school at 6:00 the next morning, this student gets at most seven hours of good sleep instead of the

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

One of the reasons that school should be started later is because it does not give growing teens enough time to sleep. Sleep researcher, Wendy Troxel, who spoke on TED, says that high school aged kids’ sleep cycles do no start until 11 p.m and do not end until 8 a.m. This means that whenever students’ alarms go off from anywhere around 5-7:30 a.m, it simply does not