Out of the fifty states in the United States of America, only nineteen states have agreed to push back their start times for schools within the districts. Only one hundred more school districts in an additional seventeen states have considered pushing back their start times.

Studies have been done that show the pros and cons of having later start times for schools. Researchers say that it would be less likely for students in high school to experience depressed moods, tardies, and drowsy, tired driving.

During one of the experiments that was performed by Dr. Kayla Wahlstrom at the University of Minnesota, they pushed the school start time from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m. and she had encouraging results. The experiment came to the conclusion that students benefited a lot from getting more sleep.

On April 2, 1999 Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced a congressional resolution to push schools to rethink their schools’ start times to sync with the teenagers biological makeup. She came up with the “ZZZ’s to A’s” Act that would encourage individual schools and school districts to make their official start times no earlier than 8:30 a.m.

“I hope this is a wake up call to school districts and parents all over this country, with early school start times, some before 7:00 a.m., adolescents are not getting enough sleep,”said Lofgren.

One thing that many schools all over the country have started doing is encouraging athletes to choose having morning practices at least once a week. This decision has high school athletes having to make the choice of losing sleep to study, or not studying to get some sleep. These practices are the athletes workout times, averaging at about 5:45 a.m. to 6:45 a.m., and sometimes earlier.

Studies done at the National Institute of Health have found that high school students require about nine to ten hours of sleep per day. These recommended hours have been taken away from students considering that classes run for about eight hours, afternoon practice takes about three hours, and the average high school student gets about three to four hours of homework a day. This creates a time-crunched situation in which the most amount of sleep a student can get is around six to seven hours.

Researchers have proved that starting school times later would be the most beneficial way to improve the schooling of high school students. They say that if the schools would agree to making the start times 8:40 a.m. the students would not only get the correct amount of sleep, but they would also improve their grades and drive safely in the mornings from not being exhausted.

Any additional can be found at the following sources:

https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/backgrounder-later-school-start-times

https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/school-start-time-and-sleep