School Kids’ Success: Later School Time Starts Could Benefit Sleep-Deprived Teens

Teens these days are often sleep-deprived and this lack of enough sleep has a detrimental effect on their school performance. This is just one of the reasons that there have been advocacies that push for a later school time starts.

Most of the schools in the country begin classes at 7 a.m., which makes the students "severely sleep-deprived," The Huffington Post reported. Teens need about 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep at night, and so the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended in 2014 that schools push back the start of classes to not earlier than 8:30 a.m. There were a number of school districts in 44 states that have done so, including in Maryland, Virginia and Washington.

Later School Starts Improve Kids' Performance

Some studies on the outcome of starting with school later than normal showed that children's performance improved. A 2012 study cited by HuffPost revealed an average of 2.2 percentage points' increase in math scores and an average of 1.5 percentage points in reading scores. "Start times really do matter. We can see clear increases of academic performance from just starting school later," the author Finley Edwards told the publication.

Prepare Children For The Real World

As expected in every major system change being introduced, this campaign also meet resistance. People argue that this is going to impact not only the kids, but the whole community activities from the opening of establishments to what time the traffic can be expected to get bad and so on. Others argue that starting the school late would only make the kids stay up even later at night, not to mention that implementing the change would be expensive.

A letter to the editor of The Cap Times by Bruce Powers of Madison, meanwhile, said that the kids should be prepared in the real world. When they get a job, they can't always tell their boss what time works for them. Having them following a certain program at the early age would prepare them in their future life.