Do you feel you are not getting enough sleep and feel exhausted each morning or that you are rushing to your next class all the time? Well, if you answered ¨yes” to either of these questions, it’s time to get over it.

  The  issue mentioned above are all the parts why students – and sometimes their parents – feel that school should start later and that more time between classes should be added. However, the truth is students  do not need more time to get to classes, and school should not start later. Adding more time between classes and starting school later disrupts a number of other events and activities in our daily lives. Really, there is no purpose to adding more time to the school day.

High schools starting at eight o’clock instead of seven forty-five will not make any difference in your sleeping schedule. Fifteen minutes in not enough time to get ¨more¨ sleep. Also, this disrupts your parents’ schedules as well. For the students who have parents dropping them off, their parents will have to go to work later in order to drop them off. Additionally, after school activities will also be disrupted, and some activities may actually have to be cancelled. After-school sports and activities take a pretty specific amount of time to complete, so even fourteen or fifteen minutes later means that this is time students won’t have at home to do homework or take care of other commitments.

Furthermore, adding time to the high school day has a domino effect; if high schools start later, so will middle schools and elementary schools. Since all schools share buses after high school is done, the buses pick up middle schools, and after that, the buses pick up elementary schools which will make other schools’ schedules shift. If the county does get more buses, that would just mean more money that the county has to pay for those vehicles, including gas and maintenance. The bus schedule will affect parents too because they will have to change their schedule to be able to pick up and drop off their child(ren). This all just seems too difficult, just so high-schoolers can get enough time to sleep.

Students think, if school starts later, they have more time in the morning to get ready or to sleep. Fifteen minutes may be enough time to get ready, but you can also just wake up earlier, and fifteen minutes won’t get you much extra time to sleep.

Also more passing time between classes is not necessary and adds unnecessary time to the school day. For instance, if we add two more minutes to the passing time, we will have seven minutes, which will add fourteen more minutes to the school time, and school will end at two forty-four, instead of 2:30, which just makes the school day longer when the only real issue is that kids just aren’t making it to class. The one way to solve the problem without adding time is for the students not to stop to talk to their friends, not do things that you know will take a long time, such as using the bathroom or going to drop a friend off. They don’t have to not talk at all but just keep track of time. Students don’t have to sit down and talk to their friends between classes, when they have the morning, lunch or after school. I’ve seen many students talking to their friends and then hear the minute bell and sprint to class. The school is big which makes it take some time to get around, but honestly in a week or maybe two you will know where your classes are and you’ll figure out shortcuts to yours classes. It isn’t difficult.

Fifteen more minutes won’t make a difference in your sleeping time or give you all the time you need to get ready, and additional passing time will just means a longer school day. The fact is, there are easy solutions to getting to class on time and easier and less-expensive ways to add fifteen minutes to your day.