If you’ve battled with your high schooler in order to get her out of bed in the morning and to school on time, you’re not alone. Teens naturally fall asleep later and thus want to sleep later, but many high schools start early, forcing students to wake before dawn.
More school systems around the country — and some in the Upper Valley — are considering later high school start times to better suit teens’ natural sleeping patterns.
“We’ve discussed it, as I think every high school ever has discussed it as the research came out,” said Patricia Barry, principal of Stevens High School in Claremont. “Invariably, we run into roadblocks.”
The big one is sports scheduling. If high schools were to start and end an hour later, it would cut into the time for sports competitions and other extracurriculars. It might also affect students who work after school. Barry said that in order to make progress, multiple schools in the region would have to change their schedules at the same time.
“If you could regionally get high schools to flip with the elementary schools so that you’re all playing games at the same time I think you’d get some traction,” she said.
Barry added that if parents pushed the issue, communities might look more seriously into how to make later start times a reality.
That may be starting to happen in the Upper Valley.
Although no schools have changed their start times, the Dresden School Board, which serves students in Hanover and Norwich, recently convened a committee to study the idea of later start times. Hanover High School Principal Justin Campbell, who is on the committee, said he expects more information within the coming months.
There is one especially compelling reason to give later start times a second look: They have been shown to reduce the number of car accidents involving young drivers.
In 2015, the National Highway Safety Administration commissioned a study to examine the connection between car accidents and early start times. The research showed that when high school start times in one county in North Carolina were moved from 7:30 to 8:45 a.m. there was a 14 percent decrease in accidents involving 16- and 17-year-old drivers over the course of the day.
Dr. Brooke Judd, the section chief of sleep medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, said that the issue of early high school start times and their effect on sleep is especially important in a rural area like the Upper Valley, where many high schoolers commute long distances to school.
“It can be really challenging for kids coming from far away for early school start times,” she said. “It can become very easy to get very sleep deprived.”
With an estimated 16.5 percent of fatal accidents involving drowsy drivers, having later school start times could very well save a life.
“I don’t think adults understand that there is this natural shift to fall asleep later, and this may require some adjustments on the other end,” Judd said.
However, with more administrators and parents becoming aware of the benefits of later start time, high school students in the Upper Valley could see a change to their schedules in the coming years.
“I’ve never met anyone who said that this would be a bad idea,” Barry said. “If we could give them just that extra hour we know attendance would be better and overall it would max kids’ learning. Seven-thirty start times didn’t work 25 years ago, and for this generation it’s even worse.”
— Kelly Burch