It’s 7:35 A.M. at Maize High School. The bell just rang, students are rushing to their classes and teachers are starting their lessons. However, California students won’t have to be at school for at least another hour. As of 2022, California law stated that no high school can start before 8:30 A.M. (this excludes rural districts).
The law was passed in order to prioritize students’ sleep. Being tired at school obviously makes it a struggle to get through the day, but it also has a lot of correlation to poor academic performance, increased anxiety, impatience, and overall poor social, emotional, and behavioral health.
When Maize students were surveyed, the majority of students reported going to sleep past 11:30 p.m. and waking up at 6:00 a.m. This would average out to six and a half hours of sleep on a daily basis. The CDC recommends teenagers get at least 8 hours of sleep, and other sources such as John Hopkins medicine, say that teenagers could need up to 9-10 hours of sleep. Maize High School and Maize Complete High School behavioral health liaison, Ashleigh Hughbanks sees the impact of sleep on students.
“When you go to sleep, it’s like your back office kind of files everything and processes through everything that you learned that day,”
Hughbanks said. ”When you get quality sleep, that’s the process, and when you don’t stuff gets missed, information gets dropped, stuff doesn’t file where it’s supposed to. There has also been studies shown that people struggle to pick up on nuances and body language from other people, [when students are tired] so statements get misconstrued which causes conflict.”
There seemed to be a unanimous agreement that Maize students were tired throughout the school day. In fact, 86% of students reported feeling tired more than half of the days out of every school week. A later start time could put an end to this issue; however, there are logistical flaws. Though around 45% of students would rather switch to an 8:30 to 3:30 schedule, there are many students and staff who don’t want to make any big sacrifices for an extra hour of sleep.
“Just looking at it [later start times] from a scientific standpoint like it’s definitely the best option but I can understand that there are a lot of other factors that go into why you guys are the early start compared to the elementary school kiddos,” Maize High School counselor Katherine Wiechman said. “Thinking about our students who have jobs after school, most of them have to be at work by like 4:00 and so if we start later that’s not going to happen.”
Having adequate time for work and free time to decompress from the school day is very important. Not to mention the hundreds of Maize High students who are in sports or activities like choir or theater who have practice daily after school.
“You still have to have the same amount of time in school so the later it gets, practices get moved,” Hughbanks said. “I have three boys in wrestling and football and we didn’t eat dinner before 9:00 for many, many, many years because practice was so late.”
Carter Harper, a Maize High School sophomore adds to the potential inconveniences that a later start time could cause for athletes.
“I do think it would be helpful in a way,” Harper said. “It’s just, I play sports and so, sports happen after school so if we start later we have to end later. which means that I get home later, so that means doing all of that at a later time; so I’m out even later.”
All in all, school start times can allow students to get more sleep and experience all the benefits that come with that. But school start time doesn’t have to dictate how much sleep students get.
Anyone can build a schedule that fits their life and allows them to get enough sleep to be alert and ready for the next school day.
“I don’t know that start time matters,” Hughbanks said. “It’s sleep routines, cause I work with teenagers here, I’m a therapist outside of school and I have teenage clients and they all admit that they stay up until hours playing video games, doom scrolling, doing whatever. Maybe not having their priorities straight and staying up late and doing their homework, because they’re doing other things during their prime hours. So I don’t think it’s necessarily start times that are the problem, I think it’s poor management.”
