Mary Whitfill, The Patriot Ledger: April 15, 2019.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies all say early start times are hurting middle and high school students, and local parents refuse to sit idly by.
Five days a week for nearly two years, Laurie Kelly’s 14-year-old daughter Anna has boarded a bus to Scituate’s Gates Intermediate School at 6:56 a.m. The eighth-grader has gotten used to it, Kelly says, even though in the winter she boards the bus in total darkness.
“When she was in seventh grade was when I first noticed that she was getting on a bus in pitch darkness and all I could think was ‘this doesn’t seem right,’” Kelly said. “The buses start picking up kids so early, and it’s just not healthy.”
Despite a decade of research that says early start times for middle and high school students can be destructive to learning and set teens up for a lifetime of bad sleep, school start times are earlier than they’ve ever been. One study, by the University of Rochester Medical Center, says today’s early start times increase students’ risk of developing depression and anxiety, and experts agree that early wake-up calls are leading to a sleep-deprived generation that will experience the consequences far into the future.
Early school start times are a relatively new phenomenon, according to the National Center for Health Research. In the 1950s and 60s, most schools started between 8:30 and 9 a.m., health policy analyst Diana Zuckerman writes, but by the year 2000 many high schools were starting at 7:30 a.m. or earlier.
“As experts in the field have made clear, the early start times that have been typical for high schools are like the worst idea you can imagine,” Zuckerman said. “If you were designing something to make it very difficult for high school students to learn and concentrate, this is what you would design. It’s so clear that this is a bad idea.”
Only a handful of schools across the region have acted on research that says teens and pre-teens need more sleep than any other age group and that school start times need to be significantly later to accommodate that need. Duxbury, Hanover, Hingham and Sharon have implemented later start times for middle or high school students within the past decade, and Scituate’s school committee is scheduled to vote on a change at its April 22 meeting.
Start School Later, a national nonprofit that helps parents advocate for a later first bell, says start times should be no earlier than 8:30 a.m. for middle and high school students. The organization says only 15 percent of high schools in the U.S. start that late.
Of the 20 middle schools in 14 South Shore towns, 11 start before 8 a.m. None start as late as 8:30. At the high school level, Hingham, Duxbury and Scituate have start times after 8 a.m., but again none of them are as late as advocates say they should be. In Pembroke, schools now start earlier than they did two years ago.
Zuckerman said sleep deprived students find it harder to concentrate in class, have lower retention rates for what they learn, poorer reaction time and motor vehicle driving skill, are more likely to be swayed by peer pressure and have a higher risk of being obese or overweight.
“In short, judgement is impaired,” Zuckerman said. “Whether that’s when we’re driving or trying to learn something or make decisions about if we should have that extra drink or eat that whole dessert. Adolescence is a really tough time for decisions and temptations, and without sleep they aren’t equipped to handle those very well.”
Teresa Stewart, a child sleep consultant and board member of the Massachusetts Association for the Education of Young Children, says adolescents between 10 and 24 years old are unable to fall asleep as early as when they were younger, and need more sleep. Stewart says adolescents’ sleep/wake cycle or body clock is on a two-to-three hour delay, meaning teens aren’t physically able to fall into a deep, restorative sleep until as late as 11 p.m., no matter what time they go to bed. And because adolescents need between seven and nine hours of deep sleep per night, a 6 a.m. wake-up time is unhealthy, she said.[…]
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