It’s no secret that students, especially high-school students, don’t get enough sleep. Some believe that a later start time for high schools would help solve this problem. I disagree. A fifty- minute-later start time will not have a significant effect on the amount of sleep students get on school nights.

Recently, Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Joshua Starr recommended a change in start time for high schools based on the report put together by the 2013 Bell Times Work Group. While the work group spent the last 9 months analyzing the pros and cons of later bell times before publishing their findings, I am still not convinced that this is the best choice for the majority of high-school students.

A change in start times will affect several aspects of student and community members’ lives, so it is important to have a majority of those affected want the change. A survey from the April 15, 2013 meeting of the Montgomery County Regional Student Government Association general assembly showed that only 43% of the 116 students present responded that high-school bell times should be changed. The survey also showed that only 43% of students believed that a later start time would allow them to get more sleep.

This survey essentially revealed that the time students are actually asleep is more important that what time they wake up. If students get home from activities an hour later, they are likely to stay up an hour later. When everything is pushed back an hour, students have to make up the lost hour at some point. For many students, the only way to do that is to work an hour later at night.

School start times for high-school students impact a wider community than just high schools. Child care, employment schedules, rush hour, elementary and middle schools extracurricular activities, student internships, and teachers will all be impacted. It is not fair for so many other groups to be inconvenienced just so high school students can go to school 50 minutes later; especially when statistics show that it will not increase the number of hours of sleep students get. These statistics show that it may not be worth the inconvenience of changing bell times if students will not actually get more sleep.

A large number of students participate in after school activities that keep them at school for hours, pushing their homework start time late into the night. Starting school later is not going to fix the problem of students staying up late to complete homework after they come home from sports practice, rehearsal for a school production, or tutoring for the National Honor Society. A large percentage of the student body participates in demanding extracurricular activities, and these activities are the primary factors that affect students sleep, not the school start time.

I know I am not the only one who often gets home between 8 and 9 p.m. and then starts homework. I know I am not the only one who falls asleep on her textbook. I know that I am not the only student whose parents get upset when I stay up late doing homework. However, changing the school start time will not fix any of those problems.

Students must consider that they choose to participate in after school activities and it is their job as students to learn how to handle the challenges of being very involved. When we leave high school or college and begin our first real jobs, we will not be given a later start time because we have other commitments that keep us up late. We may as well learn to prioritize now instead of later.