Schools should adopt later start times because experts in sleep, health, and education have concluded that early start times have a negative impact on everything in a students life from diseases to test scores.
Chris Deacon, on Today’s Parent, says that a study on school start times and academic performance confirmed that by delaying start times for middle schoolers by fifty minutes and high schoolers by seventy minutes, students got more sleep, were more alert in class, and performed better academically. Education is like breathing. If starting school early holds us back from performing at our best, why would we do something so important worse than we could.
On a Ted Talk, Why school should start later for teens, researcher, Wendy Troxel explains why later school start times have major impacts on almost every aspect of the school day and explains that students cannot perform at their max when they are sleep deprived. The key to a student’s success is sleep, the key to a student’s stress free life is sleep, and the key to a student performing at their max is sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Some say that having later school start times would disrupt the balance of our daily lives because it would push back everything else in our day. Although this may be true, it has been proven that there are far more positives to the later start times making it well worth the change. Studies have shown that students who start school later get more sleep which leads to better concentration, better academic performance, and a decrease in health issues such as depression and anxiety. Furthermore, later start times align better with the natural sleep patterns of teenagers who tend to go to bed and wake up later. This adjustment can also reduce the number of car accidents involving young drivers because they are more alert and less likely to get drowsy. Overall the benefits of later school start times, including enhanced mental and physical health, as well as improved safety outweighs the potential disruption to people’s daily schedules.
Just imagine a poor sleep deprived student, having to go to school just to do badly on an important test because he was dozing off and wasn’t in the right state of mind to take a test like that. This has happened to me first hand when I stayed up late the night before a test to study. I ended up going to bed very late which made me tired the next day. Then, I had to go to school and take a test. The second I saw the test I knew I was screwed. My mind went completely blank and I couldn’t remember any of the information I spent so much time studying the night before. When we are well rested, nothing is impossible, but when we are tired, anything can go wrong.
Starting school later allows students to get more sleep, improving their mental and physical health, academic performance, safety, and alignment with their natural biological rhythms, ultimately leading to better long term outcomes.
Works Cited:
Troxel, Wendy. “Why School Should Start Later for Teens.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS6lFDVR-3g.Accessed 24 Feb. 2025.
Deacon, Chris. “Do Later School Start Times Help Teens Get More Sleep—and Better Grades? – Today’s Parent.” Would Later School Start Times Help Teens Get More Sleep—and Better Grades?, www.todaysparent.com/kids/tween-and-teen/would-later-school-start-times-help-teens-get-more-sleep/.Accessed 24 Feb. 2025.
“Should School Start Later? How Later Start Times Could Benefit Students.” Mountain Heights Academy | Utah Online Public School Grade 7-12, mountainheightsacademy.org/should-school-start-later-how-later-start-times-could-benefit-students#:~:text=By%20delaying%20school%20start%20times,stemming%20from%20lack%20of%20sleep. Accessed 27 Feb. 2025.
