by Connor Martin ’13

High school students today face crazy schedules filled with school, homework, extracurriculars, sports and family obligations. With such busy schedules, time for sleep is often the part of the day that gets cut short. However, parents in Montgomery County are currently working on a petition that asks for later start times to the school day so that teenagers can get the extra sleep they need. But is the push for later start times necessarily a smart move?

“There are a lot of benefits to [having later start times],” noted psychology teacher Christine McKeldin. “Since about the 1930s, students are getting on average about one hour less sleep than they did back then, and there are a whole bunch of things that seem to correlate with this ‘lost hour.’”

The “Lost Hour” refers to a chapter in the book “Nurture Shock” by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. The book explains the psychology and reasoning between different phenomena in the behaviors of children and adolescents, including why teenagers have difficulty going to bed on time and getting enough sleep to prepare them for the day.

According to the book, other school systems have tried starting schools later with great success in terms of academic achievement. Bronson and Merryman explain that the overall improvement in academics in these school systems is because the schools accommodate teenagers’ biological clocks. The book explains that the biological clock in teenagers “does a ‘phase shift’ that keeps adolescents up later. In prepubescents and grownups, when it gets dark outside, the brain produces melatonin, which makes them sleepy. But adolescent brains don’t release melatonin for another 90 minutes.” Then, the brain continues to produce melatonin after teens have woken up for the next school day. “It’s obvious why people are sleeping in first period,” McKeldin added.

The petition parents are starting online at signon.org aims to change the time when high schools start in the morning so that behaviors like sleeping in class will happen less often. The petition requests for Montgomery County high schools to start the day no earlier than 8:15 a.m., so that teenagers can get an extra hour of sleep every night. If the school day starts later, then, according to the petition website, there will be a decrease in absences, tardiness, sleeping in class, traffic accidents and visits to the nurse as well as an improvement in overall academic performance.

That said, problems could arise from starting high schools later. If high schools start at 8:15 a.m., students who ride buses would be going to school slightly later than middle school students and earlier than elementary school students. Currently, buses transport high school students then go back for middle school students and again for the elementary school students. If high school students went to school at the same time as the younger ones, the county would need to have more buses and more bus drivers, which would cost a substantial amount of money. Alternatively, if middle or elementary schools switch start time with high schools, the younger kids would be waiting for buses in the dark.

“I’d love to start my day later, but I think it’s impractical,” stated science teacher Glenn Miller. He explains that starting the day later does not solve any of the problems that teenagers face with the regular start times because everything would simply be pushed back. “If you start later, then practice starts [and ends] later, and then you’re still staying up later to do homework. Family obligations, more homework one night, practice or a game; you run into those problems,” said Miller.

According to an MCPS study, “Changing Bell Times,” issued in January 1998, these same problems caused the standardization of the 7:25 start time in all high schools in 1993. Since then, MCPS has conducted research on whether or not high schools should start later. In 1997, three MCPS high schools shifted to a later start time, but this shift created inconsistent results in academic achievement, and showed no absolute evidence that starting later benefitted classroom performance.

The online petition for later start times needs 15,000 signatures before being sent to Superintendent Joshua Starr. There are  10,120 signatures as of December 10. Whether or not Starr will consider later start times is unknown.

“Things would have to change, and it would be a culture shock. MCPS is ginormous, [and if later start times change], that’s a large amount of people that are being affected. I wouldn’t see MCPS making a move until a smaller district did it and saw some proof,” said McKeldin.

The petition is online at signon.org/sign/changing-montgomery-county.

On November 12, Starr announced that he would look into later start times.