Do you also hate waking up at 6am every morning to get on the bus and go to school? Tired of being so tired you don’t comprehend any of your morning classes? Do you want to go back to kindergarten so we can have nap time?
Yeah, me too.
If school started just an hour later, we would be much more alert, decrease tardiness, and perform better in school. As presented by the Sleep Foundation, the majority of U.S. adults and parents think that school should start later too. I think a reasonable time would be to push it back just an hour. That would mean we would start at 9 a.m. and finish at 3:40 p.m.
A lot of people have to be out of the door to catch their bus around 6:45 a.m. Do you know how hard it is to get out of bed every day for 180 days with only three barely week-long breaks in between? For an adult who is fully grown and done developing they need around seven to nine hours of sleep. However, teenagers need eight to 10 hours. In the statistics that I found, most teachers wanted school to start earlier.
Obviously, they don’t need as much sleep and can get up sooner. Teens also are quite stressed from being swamped with schoolwork and changing hormones. You might argue that we should just go to better earlier. I personally go to bed at 9-10pm and get barely eight hours of sleep. I also find that I need closer to 10 hours to feel fully awake.
According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, this lack of sleep can lead to being overweight, not engaging in physical activity, depression, unhealthy and risky behaviors, and most importantly not performing well in school.
School claims to want the best for the kids but in this day and age, not everyone can get as much sleep as they need. We are not as healthy as we can be and are not reaching our full potential. Not being able to give your full attention to lessons can cause you to fall behind and miss important things.
I find that often teachers go quite fast and don’t really repeat much of what they say. I struggle much more in the classes I have in the morning than in the classes I have in the afternoon.
If school started an hour later that could decrease the amount of tardiness and absences. I hear all the time from my peers: I’m so tired, I wish my parents could pick me up. Or, it’s too early for all this, I wish I could take a nap. All the time, they want to miss school, solely on wanting even just an hour of extra sleep.
As we get older, school starts later and lessons get harder. It doesn’t make any sense. Students need to speak out about our concerns with our education.
The superintendent should ensure that we start school an hour later as soon as possible. The logical thing to do would be to issue it to start next school year, but honestly the sooner the better. Not just for us at SDHS, but for Stephen Decatur Middle School and Berlin Intermediate School. They are even younger than we are and start so much earlier.
The school system is destroying our mental and physical health. A lot of this could be fixed with more hours of sleep.
