CCalifornia teens will be forced to take a nap later this year due tonewly enactedlaws is now possible. This law prohibits snoozing in most high schools and junior high schools. They start before 8:30 am and at 8:00 am respectively.
The law, the first in the United States to mandate school start times statewide, not only serves California students but also public health professionals fighting the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) policy. is also important for Called teenage sleep deprivation an "epidemic"Both the AAP and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have long opposed early morning school hours. ,
School start times are an attempt to help teens get more sleep. According to research, this is only a big problem in the United States. According to the CDC, about 30% of high school students get the recommended eight hours of sleep each night at school. problems such as use, depression, and poor academic performance.
Circadian rhythms– internal light-mediated cues that help regulate sleep – have long been shown by research to change throughout the life cycle. It's one of the reasons why we naturally wake up earlier as we get older. On the other hand, teenagers' body clocks are best synchronized withbedtime around 11:00 pm. Or it's midnight and the wake-up time is about 9 hours later. This is not possible if classes start before 8am.
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The preschool schedule is a holdover from a time when most homes didn't have two working parents and nothing to worry about. I will stick to the schedule from 9:00 to 5:00. The juggling act of scheduling bus routes, classes, athletics, and other extracurricular activities keeps the bell ringing early.
But these schedules are not based on science. Research has long suggested that the mismatch between adolescents' internal rhythms and external schedules leads them to failure. According to one of her 1998 papers, when a small group of students started school about an hour earlier than before, they experienced "significant sleep deprivation and daytime sleepiness." Did.
Delaying the start time has been shown to have the opposite effect. A 2002 study conducted five years after seven public high schools in Minneapolis changed their start time from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m. I have found that I get about an extra hour of sleep each night. Students also reported better attendance and fewer symptoms of depression. In a 2010 study, researchers Lord He examined students at an Island State high school after changing the start time from 8:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. We found it added 45 minutes per night for her. Fatigue and improved mood.
More recently, a study published in 2021 found that significantly more Denver-area middle and high school students I know I am getting enough sleep. Another 2021study of Colorado studentsfound that those who arrived before 8:30 a.m. were slightly less likely to attempt suicide than those who arrived later. was found to be high, but the results were not statistically significant. Although more research is needed and many confounding variables may obscure associations, findings suggest that starting classes late can improve mental health amongteens.
But changing bell times is not a panacea.A February 2022 research review found that late start times and When we examined the relevance of , we found mixed results. Some schools reported positive effects, while others reported negative or unclear outcomes of the changes.
There is also a lot of logistics to deal with. In 2016, public schools in Durham, North Carolina changed their school start time from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. In a surveyconducted the following year, only 26% of her school officials said their children were resting better. 14% say they are learning more. Only 13% of faculty and 27% of parents want to keep the new schedule. why. The drastic change meant that the school day ended later, pushing extracurricular activities, after-school work and homework late into the night, sometimes keeping kids much longer than their previous bedtime.
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2018, School in Newport, Rhode Island, returned to its original start time of, but a subsequent two-year experiment with the bell helped it coordinate with nearby schools and schedule extracurricular activities. It created a lot of logistical headaches, such as the difficulty of Transportation can also be an issue. Coordinating bus schedules, competing with traffic patterns, and finding ways for dual-income parents to drop off and pick up their children late in the morning some schools have learned by delaying their schedules. 83}
California teacher Jeremy Adams raised many of these concerns in a January Cal Matters op-ed, stating that the new state law would: He added that it would create inconvenience for teachers who have to stay on campus. Extracurricular activities that begin after the end of school. "Ultimately, this law will serve as a case study of 'unintended consequences.'"
The debate over school start times is still an area of active research. A team atis studying how changing school start times not only affects the health of students, but also the health of their families, teachers and the wider community. As education researcher Deborah Temkintold NBC News after the policy was first passed in her 2019, all attention will be on changes across California. I guess. I think other states will likely consider it," Temkin said.
It's too early to say how the experiment will turn out as the new semester has just started. But as some California high school students told the Mercury News, a delayed start time isn't enough to cure their fatigue. "When you're in high school, you wake up feeling tired," said Annika Bose, her senior. "At least now I have time for coffee before class."
Write to Jamie Ducharme at jamie.ducharme@time.com