Junior Maddy Mathew was up late at night catching up on work and studying. Taking four AP classes brings her stress at this time of the year, when she struggles to manage her extracurriculars. After staying up that late, Mathew only got about five hours of sleep. The last thing she wants to do with little sleep is drive to school and have to sit through first period math, but she can’t afford to fall behind so she manages to get up and go. She just barely gets through the day and can’t wait to take a nap after school, but then she remembers she has basketball practice and loads of homework to do. All she can think about is how much she wished school started later so she could sleep in more.
Students argue that school starting at 7:45 a.m. does not give them enough time to get a good night’s sleep. It is recommended by the CDC that teenagers get eight to 10 hours of sleep every night, but with homework keeping them up late and having to wake up at around 6 a.m., students don’t get the minimum amount of sleep they need. Not getting enough sleep can lead students to skip their morning classes due to tiredness and a lack of motivation to get up. Sophomore Peyton Higgins said, “I get six to seven hours because most nights I have to stay up late doing homework.”
Homework is a common stressor for students, but extracurriculars, AP exams and sports also stress them out. Dealing with stress is difficult without proper sleep, and getting less than eight to 10 hours only makes it worse. According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep deficiency can lead to other mental health issues like depression and suicide and, since we cannot control the amount of homework we have, it is important to get enough sleep to alleviate the chance of stress expanding into something worse.
Another complaint made by freshmen in particular is about the transition from middle school start time to that of high school. With the heavier workload, sleep is difficult to manage. In middle school, school starts at 8:15 a.m. so freshmen now have to adjust to waking up 30 minutes earlier. This can be a hard shift for students and their parents if they drive to school. Freshman Malia Bellamy said that the change from middle school to high school was, “extremely hard because I am not a morning person and I hate working up early. My mom gets mad at me because I never wake up.”
While starting school later can appear tempting at first, it’s important to realize that it would also cause the school day to end later. On top of homework, students have extracurriculars, jobs, sports and other hobbies outside of school that they need the scarce amount of hours they get after school to complete. “It’s hard to say that school starting later would make a difference. The problem is we just get too much work and there aren’t enough hours in the day,” Mathew said.
In the end it all comes down to what is the most important to you, more sleep in the morning, or more time to work after school. Either way, without a later start to school in the morning, finding a way to make up for the sleep you lose on school mornings, either on weekends or with after-school naps, is essential for maintaining a healthy life.
