Later Start Time Research Paper

Today, only 31% of students are receiving the recommended eight hours sleep each night (Wheaton). This causes a problem called sleep deprivation, which can lead to a decrease in academic performance and overall physical health. Lack of sleep poses a big problem to public schools due to the fact that most students report being lethargic during the school day. This has caught the eye of school board members and teachers alike, which leads to the question: To what extent should the school day be modified to accommodate a teenager’s natural sleep pattern? While advocacy groups would say that schools should incorporate a later start time to increase academic performance, schools, in turn, would have to pay millions of dollars to shift or extend …show more content…
This money would come straight out of taxpayers' pockets, adding to the rapidly increasing national debt of $19 trillion dollars (“National Debt”). Although a delayed school start time has the potential to increase academic performance, schools should not endorse a later start time as it does not guarantee better performance that would outweigh the cost. A later start time would cost millions in taxpayer dollars. Currently, most schools in the same district share buses and in order to implement a later start time, schools would need to purchase additional buses and hire additional drivers to keep up with the number of students required to transport. Buses would have to pick up all students independently, as opposed to pick up the older students first, and then going back for elementary students. With this being said, the cost of …show more content…
“A late school start time does not preclude the need for other interventions that have the potential to improve the sleep of adolescents”(Wheaton). Later start time will not improve students sleep by itself. Creating better sleep habit is much more than delaying school start times. It requires parent influence and regular bedtime and rise time, including the weekends. These techniques could be used to increase the amount of sleep regardless of start time. Furthermore, high school students identified that too much homework, stress, TV, and hanging out with friends prevented them from adequate sleep (“Study of Safe“ 9). School is not the only factor affecting the amount of sleep students get every night. If schools want to increase the amount of sleep students receive each night, they could consider reducing homework and high stress projects. Additionally, students may choose to stay up later at night (Wheaton), believing that due to a delayed start time, they can go to bed later.When in fact students could receive the same amount of sleep even with an earlier school start time. Kyla Wahlstorm, a college professor at the university of Minnesota, found that her study only showed a “significant increase in the 1st-period grade point average in one or more core courses” (11). At most,