San Luis Obispo High School students are often tired during their first class of the day. However, many people don’t think that there is a solution to this. The school would function much better with a school day that started at 9 a.m. every day. It has been proven that students work better when they get more sleep and that teenagers have a slightly shifted optimal sleep schedule. Biologically, it is better for teenagers to go to bed later and wake up later. So why do high schools continue to stick to early start times?
A later start time is something that almost everyone agrees would be better for the students. Numerous studies have shown that a school day lasting from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. would be more effective than one from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. According to the article, “Why School Should Start Later in the Morning,” The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is urging middle schools and high schools to start later in the day. This article goes on to state that everyone learns better when they are awake and that schools have a large role in influencing students’ schedules. The UCLA study, “Sleep and Teens,” says that a circadian rhythm controls when one feels the need to sleep. The circadian rhythms are shifted by a few hours for people at high school age. This means that SLOHS students naturally go to bed later, but still need a total of nine hours of sleep per night meaning that they also need to wake up later in the morning.
If there is so much evidence for school starting later, then why haven’t we already changed the schedule? Teachers’ internal clocks run differently than students’. However, the shift in the circadian rhythm of students is an entirely natural thing, and is not something that these students can do very much about. What one needs to remember is that an education system should be made for its students, and making a later starting time for school is one way of doing that. Students are the most important part of any education system, and the way that students learn is affected by their sleep, so one should take into serious consideration the possibility of having a school day start an hour later.
