preview

Why We Should School Start Later

Decent Essays

As the sun is barely rising Victoria is already on the school bus going to Catalina Foothills High School in Tucson Arizona. Finally, by the time third period is practically over she begins to wake up and feel ready to learn, but the school day is already halfway at an end. Seventy percent of teens aren’t getting enough sleep and this could be contributing to why they can’t focus or retain information in their first classes like Victoria (O’Neill 1). Whether or not school should start later to fix this problem has become a large debate in today’s society. Later start times are beneficial for adolescents because it will decrease rates of sleep deprivation and fit their biological rhythm, as well as bring importance to the issue, even though …show more content…

In addition, with such high academic demands, extracurriculars, volunteer work, and sometimes jobs the children become sleep deprived without even knowing it. Yuan, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics, says, “They say they are tired, but they don’t realize they are actually sleep-deprived. And if you ask kids to remove an activity they would rather not. They would rather give up sleep than an activity” (Richter). Regardless of where they come from of who they are, most teens don’t sleep enough during the week and sleep in on the weekends to compensate for lost sleep. But, many accumulate large amounts of sleep loss that they don’t sufficiently recover on the weekend and become fatigued when Monday comes. This problem needs to be confronted, but with not much importance in today's society it's hard to make a change like pushing back school start times. With an epidemic like sleep deprivation sweeping America's teens, school start times should be pushed back to also match teens biological rhythm. At some point our society is going to have to face the problem, but until then as for Victoria and many other teens sleep deprivation will remain a problem as they stay up late in the night because of overwhelming amounts of homework after three hours of dance class only to repeat the cycle the next morning when she wakes up while the outside world is still

Get Access