By Blair Donald
Round Table Broadcast Producer
The debate over the time that school should start for high school students is one that seems to appear periodically without ever accomplishing anything. The argument is that high school students statistically need more sleep than younger students, so why does high school at 7:30 a.m. when the primary and elementary schools start at 9:00 a.m.?
The opposite side of the debate is that high school students have activities to attend after school, so if school starts early and ends early, the students who play sports, are members of the drama department or work, have time to go to those things and get their homework done.
However, students who play sports willingly choose to play them, and those who don’t are still forced to get up early and go to school. Additionally, if a student is in a lot of extracurricular activities as well as AP courses, sometimes the workload on top of their activities is too much and students are forced to get by on very few hours of sleep- speaking from experience here.
If younger children don’t need as much sleep, don’t have a huge workload, and aren’t in as many extra activities, it doesn’t make sense that they start school so much later than high school students. They are usually up earlier than teenagers are anyway, so it would probably lessen a lot of complaining.
Another effect this can have is students, because of lack of sleep (and probably motivation), will fall asleep during class. If students are sleeping and missing information, they may not even know how to do the homework that they are staying up so late to get done.
Some have argued that students that do get their homework and sports practices finished at a reasonable hour, rather than going straight to bed, will stay up late messing around on the internet, watching television, or talking to their friends.
However, it’s not messing around so much as winding down after a busy day. All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy, and students aren’t going to devote all the time they have to being responsible and getting work done. In a perfect world, perhaps, but in our imperfect universe we must leave time for humans to be human.
Students with and without packed schedules would benefit from getting more time to sleep in the morning. Some students aren’t ready to eat breakfast at 6:45 a.m. or don’t have time to eat, and so will skip the most important meal of the day. If breakfast gets neglected, a student could be unhealthy because their metabolism hasn’t been kick started and hunger during the school day can be quite distracting.
Frederick County Public Schools has a new superintendent, so maybe next year the time school starts will be changed. Results everywhere have shown the reversal of schedules in the school system to be beneficial, so a change in policy is probably inevitable. Hopefully FCPS will catch up with the times and high school students will be able to sleep a little longer.
