BEEP BEEP BEEP is the sound of your morning alarm going off to wake up for school. After you had to stay up late last night finishing homework and studying for tests, the last thing you want to do is crawl out of the warm bed and do it all over again. I believe that schools should have later start times to improve the level of information understood, and retained by the student body and to improve the learning environment.
The first reason to have later start times is that many students on average don’t get enough sleep. According to an article about the benefits of napping done by Education Weekly, it states “nearly 7 in 10 U.S. teenagers get less than the recommended eight hours of sleep a night.” Studies have shown that getting less than enough sleep can negatively affect things like productivity, focus, alertness, and motivation. All are necessary for students to excel in their academics. This can especially be a problem for student-athletes, living this kind of lifestyle requires a lot of motivation. Feeling tired and constantly not having enough time to do everything can cause chronic stress, which leads to many other health problems. Implementing later start times would help with these problems.
The second reason is that there are severe negative effects of not getting enough sleep. An article written by Cleveland Clinic states, “Sleep deprivation causes fatigue, low energy and excessive sleepiness, which can affect your ability to do things you love and simply complete day-to-day tasks.” This can create a snowball effect, the less sleep you get the more you miss, the more you fall behind, and the later you have to stay up to get everything done. An endless loop that can become worse and worse throughout the year. This also fosters a toxic environment for being sick and needing to stay home. Staying home causes more and more stress to be piled onto students schedules. Later start times would help reduce stress levels.
Additionally, once you fall behind, it can be almost impossible to catch up. The American Psychological Association tells us, “But even sleeping until noon on weekends isn’t enough to make up for the sleep deficit they accumulate night after night during the school week.” After an exhausting week, many kids tend to sleep for the majority of the weekend to “make up for lost sleep during the week” but this is not the case. This can even make things worse. Studies show that students who sleep in for more than one hour on the weekend have increased anxiety levels. With later start times, students will have more time to relax.
On the other hand, many people may think that later start times may cause the same problems. By starting later, that means that school gets out later. Which may cause the same problems and stress levels. What they fail to see is that one of the biggest reasons that kids are stressed is because they are sleep deprived.
Later start times for school will better the living conditions of students. This will improve the mental health, physical health and the attendance of students. Schools say that they’re doing all they can to help their students succeed, this should be the next step.
