School Conflicts With Teens’ Sleep Schedule

Almost 90 percent of high school students get less than the eight and a half to nine hours of recommended sleep on school nights, according to a 2006 study by the National Sleep Foundation.

After puberty, the biological clock is pushed backwards, making it difficult for teenagers to fall asleep early.

“Naturally, teenagers have a tendency to become night owls,” neurologist Dr. Kyoung Bin Im said.

With over 42 percent of public schools in the United States starting classes before 8:00am, early school start times conflict with teenagers’ sleep schedule.

“In first period I’m still kind of waking up, so for most of first period I don’t really hear anything that the teacher says,” Serena Collins ‘18 said.

English teacher, Ali Borger-Germann agreed that early classes are difficult.

“I’ve noticed that first hour is really subdued, really quiet,” she said. “Discussions never get off the ground.”

City High’s Health Office Paraeducator, Anna Manternacht, says that lack of sleep causes the inability to comprehend and recall information among other issues.

“From the neurological standpoint, you’re a mess,” she said. “Physiologically, it affects your energy. It affects every cell in your body so you feel super run down, totally lethargic- you feel like you’re just not functioning well. It impacts our immune system so we’re more susceptible to viruses, to bacteria.”

As a father, Superintendent Steve Murley recognizes the difficulties students have with early school start times.

“I have to pry [my kids] out of bed each morning and force them to go to sleep each night. They wake up in the morning and they’re perennially tired,” Murley said. “That’s probably not conducive to good learning at the beginning of the day so, obviously, I think that I could see some benefits right in my home to a later start time.”

The possibility of a later school start in the ICCSD has been discussed.

“We actually have a committee right now that is discussing what it would look like if we moved from days of instruction to hours of instruction, and what that might mean for us, as we look at when the day starts, how long the day is, how many periods are in the day,” Murley said. “[We’re] kind of starting from scratch and re imagining what it would look like.”

Although there are benefits to a later school start time, Murley can also see numerous problems to this change.

“Part of it is the logistics of running a large district-we’ve got kids at the elementary level, kids at the junior high, and kids at the high school level,” Murley said. “We have to bus kids to school, so we have to run a couple of routes of buses to try to get the kids to all three of the levels.”

The plan becomes more complicated with students involved in activities outside of school.

“Then we’ve got issues with extracurricular activities after school:  sports, music, academics, and drama. For everyone that is participating in interscholastic athletics, that is competing with other schools in other districts,” he said. “The likelihood is that they’re not going to change, so competition times are going to remain the same. Now you have kids missing a lot of their afternoon classes when they leave to participate in athletic extracurriculars.”

Murley believes an early start is necessary in order to fit all after school activities in before dinner.

“Though probably not optimal for your teenage brain and body, it fits the logistics of running a district.”

As for now, a later school start time is not impossible, but it most likely won’t be enforced in the near future.

“We’ve recognized the challenges and the hurdles, and it’s not out of the question for us,” Murley said. “But we want to make sure that we move very slowly with it, because we want to make sure that we really understand where those challenges lie and what opportunities we might have to try and address.”