Essay On Streator High School

Kyndall Fritz~ I am a member of the girls’ varsity tennis team. I am a year round competitive swimmer and I plan on swimming for Wheatmore this winter. In my spare time I like to hang out with my friends and go to the beach. I am an active member in my church youth group. My friends would describe me as a funny, friendly, and kind hearted person.

The primary reason for attending school is for adolescents to get an education in hopes of getting a good job.  Attendance, test scores, and GPA’s all play an important role in a student’s success in school, and if they can all be improved by pushing the start time back, then this issue should be pushed further.  The root problem of students not performing to their full potential has to do with the inability to focus from drowsiness in class due to the lack of sleep they are getting.  To support this point, Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, and his team, “found that students showed up for morning classes seriously sleep-deprived and that the 7:20 a.m. start time required them to be awake during hours that ran contrary to their internal clocks” (Richmond).  In other words, Carskadon believes that current high school start times go against teens’ natural sleep patterns, making them be awake at a time where their bodies aren’t ready to get up yet.  This causes concentration issues making paying attention in class harder, and kids not getting the best grades they can.  Also, sleep won’t get any

Going to bed at 2:00 in the morning and waking up at 6:30 AM to go to school is a nightmare for anyone. Unfortunately, this situation is far too common in today’s schools. But have you ever wondered how insufficient sleep affects your everyday life? Schools must start later. With early start times thwarting students’ health and safety, adolescents needing more sleep in general, and teens having trouble sleeping early, later start times are essential.

Lack of sleep can lead teenagers to gain weight, become depressed or engage in risky activities (i.e. drugs, alcohol) and can lead to poor school performance overall (CDC). These consequences are not the only problem with teenagers losing sleep because of school work. During teenage years, an individual’s biological clock causes them to want to go to sleep later in the morning due to various hormones in their bodies. Students aren’t naturally supposed to wake up early, yet in 42 states the majority of school’s start before 8:30 A.M (CDC), but

In today's society, most people desire success. They want to attend a respected college, earn exceptional grades, get a wonderful job, and make a lot of money. However, the road to success starts before all of those accomplishments can happen. This journey begins in the classroom. In the classroom, over 25% of all high-school students fall asleep one or more times a week (Mayer-Hohdahl 1). Why does this happen? Schools have sleepy students because of their early start times. "Starting high school early is probably one of the worst things you can do as far as timing the day, as far as adolescents being alert or ready" (Wooley 2). This is a serious problem in high schools all across the nation. Students are tired, and teachers are

Imagine you are experiencing a deep sleep with your favorite dream streaming like a movie, when all of a sudden your alarm clock goes off. Knowing you have to wake up is horrid, but can’t you simply press the snooze button for a few more minutes? Wrong! I know that same feeling of reluctance, but sadly the days don’t wait, and we all must wake up. However, children these days don’t get enough sleep, and would benefit tremendously from a few extra hours. I believe that if the school day started a few hours later, students would be more alert, process more knowledge, and produce better work.

One of the biggest struggles for students today, is the struggle to wake up for school in the mornings, and to make it to class on time. Because of the start times that many high and middle schools currently have, students are having to get up early to get ready, therefore providing them with little sleep at night. They are faced with their everyday schedules, things that are happening in other parts of their lives, as well as having to keep up with their schoolwork. All of this results in a loss of sleep, with the added factor of having to wake up early in the mornings. Having a later start time for schools is beneficial for student’s health, safety, and their overall performance in school.

“Sleep is the best cognitive enhancer we have,” according to Russell Foster Ph.D. who is the Professor of Circadian Neurosciences. This was used in an article by schoolstarttime.org Many students are not receiving the appropriate amount of sleep which is affecting their learning. Starting school an hour later would improve attitudes, increase test scores, and increase attentiveness in students.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that teenagers sleep late into the day. Laying in a warm bed piled 3 feet high with duvets and blankets, an alarm clock beside them that may have been used only once on the first day of school. Many people believe this is due to pure laziness, however this has been proven wrong (for the majority of them anyways) as it is actually quite natural. Unfortunately the school times don’t coincide with what is best for the optimum chance to learn and capability to keep the information.

Almost every day high school students are waking up around six o’clock in the morning to get ready for school, some even earlier than that. Nearly every morning students are waking up without adequate sleep. If sleep is one of the most essential needs of the body in order to grow and develop, shouldn’t we be more aware of how much it affects students everyday performance? The ways in which students are affected by sleep-deprivation is precisely why school needs to start later.

Based on the importance of sleep and on the vast amount of information available on the subject, it is surprising that many schools all over the United States still have an extremely early start time. Throughout adolescence, sleep is considered to be even more important as the amount of sleep needed does not drop significantly from childhood, however, the changes related to puberty show a delayed evening onset of melatonin causing a change in the circadian rhythm—a person’s “biological” clock—preference to evenings (Owens, Belon & Moss, 2010). Because of this change, adolescents tend to present difficulties falling asleep prior 11pm and waking up prior to 8am could be causing issues from mood and attention problems, to even something less discussed

The American education system is diverse and unique, and one aspect that varies wildly across the country is school start times. Deciding the start times for schools is dependent on many factors including bus schedules (Edwards, 2012), biological development (Borlase, Gander, & Gibson, 2013; Perkinson-Gloor, Lemola, & Grob, 2013), and parental preference (Edwards, 2012; Perkinson-Gloor et al., 2013). School start times are considered one aspect that can affect sleep duration, since they affect wake time. Adequate, high quality sleep is extremely important for adolescents and inadequate sleep can lead to a number of negative outcomes including poorer physical and mental health, as well as poorer academic performance (Borlase et al., 2013; Edwards, 2012; Keller, Smith, Gilbert, Bi, Haak, & Buckhalt, 2015; Paksarian, Rudolph, Jian-Ping, & Merikangas, 2015; Perkinson-Gloor, et al., 2013). Therefore, school start times are important to the field of education, because start times affect sleep and sleep, or lack thereof, can affect cognitive ability and performance. We are always looking to improve our schools and better educate our children, and the adjustment of the start time is a small change that may have a big impact.

When adolescents receive an adequate amount of sleep, their memory improves substantially, leading them to perform better on school assignments such as projects, quizzes, and tests. Furthermore, when youngsters are able to follow their natural sleep clocks, their brains are more likely to understand and comprehend material that is taught to them during class, which will result in them receiving higher grades on assignments. A study conducted at Harvard University showed that adolescents who received at least eight and a half hours of sleep were fifty percent more likely to earn all A’s during the school year than teenagers who only received around six to seven hours of sleep. Therefore, delaying school start times will allow teenagers to show their true academic potential. Even though some people may argue that high school start times do not need to be delayed in order for students to perform well in school, adolescents are more likely to be determined to work hard and obtain better grades when they sleep sufficiently. In addition to the drastic improvement on school performance, students will also be more engaged in their education with later start

Many individuals, especially adolescents, do not function well early in the morning. “…many teenagers are going to school with their brains essentially in sleep mode” (Kaufman, 2001). This makes it difficult to retain information and in return use the information they have learned later on according to Robert Gerson, a physician and parent (Heinen, 1996). There is a reasonable explanation for why adolescents need the sleep they need at the times in which they need it, or do it for that matter. “Their circadian rhythms, determined by release of the hormone melatonin and other factors, were telling them to stay up later (even if their homework was finished and the day’s chores complete) and to get up later. On basic biological level, many had no more control over that circadian switch than they did over growing facial hair or breasts” (Kaufman, 2001).

The brain does not fully function or wake up until 9:30-10:00 a.m. According to, “Teenagers Start School at 10am in Oxford University Sleep Experiment”, it says, “‘So we’re exploring the possibility that if you delay the school’s start time until 10am, that will improve learning performance.” If school’s give a student’s brain time to wake up, the student’s grades will improve.