![]() ![]() ![]() When adolescents don’t get adequate sleep, they experience health problems, according to the National Sleep Foundation, including impaired alertness and attention, which is important in academics but also important for those teenagers who drive to and from school. to 9 a.m., according to a Start School Later press release. In Columbia, Mo., the board of education on Monday voted 6-1 to delay start times for the district’s high schools after a grassroots effort led by Students’ Say, a student-run advocacy group in the district, successfully pushed to delay start times from 7:30 a.m. “We need to start with the premise that ‘it must be done,’ ” said Terra Ziporyn Snider, a medical writer, historian, and co-founder of Start School Later, “The science is now at a point where start times could really be changed, but it requires community involvement,” she said. Michael Rubinstein, the public coordinator for the organization, said there’s an untapped interest in the issue, and the online petition helped catalyze it. The Maryland chapter of Start School Later, a conference co-sponsor and a national coalition of parents, educators, students, and professionals, started a petition specifically for Montgomery County, to change schools’ start times to 8:15 a.m. In Maryland, a bill was introduced in February to set up a task force to study later school start times and sleep needs of adolescents. She credits Arlington’s success in changing its school start times to the superintendent at the time, Robert Smith, and a focused school board. DeFranco said, other counties, including Fairfax and Maryland’s Montgomery County, were also examining their start times, but most of those movements died. DeFranco said, but after some trial and error and work with neighboring Fairfax County, Va., and the Arlington department of parks and recreation to share facilities for practice and game time, educators were able to devise a working strategy that allowed everyone to participate in something.Īround the same time Arlington was looking at the issue, Ms. There were some activities that were “non-negotiable,” such as golf and cross country, considered daylight sports, Ms. One of the challenges Arlington County faced was competition for interscholastic sports and facilities use. When the school system in Arlington County, Va., first considered pushing back high school start times in 1999, officials had to take into consideration the start times for all school levels and for outside programs like child care, said Deborah DeFranco, a supervisor for the county’s Health, Physical and Driver Education department. This sleep loss can be further exacerbated by environmental factors like light exposure from computer screens or mobile phones, which can distract the brain from thinking it’s time to sleep.Īs more research becomes available on the relationship between adolescent sleep and school start times, educators, parents, and students throughout the country are taking steps to bring school start times into the spotlight. Owens.īut with some schools starting as early as 7 a.m., this means many teenagers aren’t getting the recommended nine hours of sleep for proper rest and development. Hence, it’s normal for teenagers to be awake until about 11 p.m., according to Dr. Judith Owens, the director of sleep medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, with many factors “basically conspiring to increase the risks of insufficient sleep in this population.”Īs adolescents hit puberty, their natural sleep-wake cycles begin to shift such that they are unable to fall asleep as early as they did when they were in elementary school. Sleep changes in adolescents is “kind of a perfect-storm scenario,” said Dr. Sleep deprivation is considered a widespread, chronic health problem among adolescents, according to the Arlington, Va.-based National Sleep Foundation, and can have negative effects on their cognitive development and cause mental and emotional problems.Įxperts recommend that high-school-age youths get around nine hours of sleep per night, but the reality is that many teenagers get seven hours or less, according to the sleep foundation. Although the sample is small, the study’s main author, economist Finley Edwards from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, said the findings are significant enough to be important, suggesting that later start times can be a relevant policy change for those districts trying to find ways to improve students’ academic achievement.
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