Imagine getting an extra hour of sleep for the rest of the school year. This extra hour would help you be more energized for school in the morning. It would help your grades improve. It would even make your overall attitude better.

Recently MCPS Superintendent Dr. Joshua Starr, along with the Bell Times Work Group, proposed pushing back high school start times by 50 minutes.

Teens’ natural sleep cycle puts them in conflict with early school start times. I’m the type of student who cannot function at all in school without a sufficient amount of sleep. The way our school system is currently set up punishes students who need more sleep to be an outstanding student. I know that no one factor makes all the difference, but this is one that makes a significant impact.

Students are commonly overloaded with an enormous amount of homework – often from seven different classes – which makes it very difficult to balance their sleep schedule. A diligent student who stays up late doing homework has a hard time getting up in the morning. This is due not only to his/her long night doing homework, but also due to teens’ circadian rhythm, which, essentially, forces them to stay up late. Add to this mix the fact that most high school students are not able to wake up on their own and need an alarm clock or a parent to wake them on school days, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. An extra hour in the morning to sleep would have a very positive impact on this problem.

A need to get more sleep could be a fundamental reason why a significant number of students have such poor attendance early in the day. If the start time was pushed back an hour, students would be less likely to be late and, perhaps, fall into the LC policy and lose a credit for a class where they worked hard. The Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota conducted a study on the impact of changing school start times on academic performance, behavior and safety in urban and suburban schools. They found that making school start later led to an increase in attendance, less tardiness, and students making fewer trips to the school nurse.

Ultimately, sleep is one of the most important factors a person needs to function properly. Without sleep people become very irritable and aggressive, which are not emotions one should bring into an educational facility. Although an hour doesn’t seem like a lot, it is pretty significant. Due to the fact that the average sleep cycle is four 15-20 minute stages, an hour of sleep can greatly impact a student’s attention span and attitude.