Hello,
I've recently completed my first large scholarly work. It is an essay concerning sleep patterns during puberty and their incompatibility with school start times of 7:20 AM. During puberty, sleep cycles shift one hour later, which leads to lost sleep and drowsier mornings if teens wake at 6:00 AM. The solution is to make school start times later so that teenagers can get their sleep, which will reduce depression and car accidents while increasing attendance and grades.
I've come here because I've found that some of you are very, very good at taking ideas apart, chewing them up, and then spitting back a thoughtful answer. I hope that enough of you will do so that I will be able to change my essay before I submit it.
Acknowledgements:
- If you'd like to say "tl;dr", just get out. This is part of my effort to actually change the start time of my school, so please, take it seriously.
- As of Friday, 7 October, 2011, 21:50 Eastern Standard Time, this essay remains a work in progress that is very similar to the open beta of a program. In addition, I still need to collect a few more signatures on the petition that I will present along with the study to my principal (I should get around 30 more on Tuesday if everything pans out) before I will release the final version.
Thanks to:
- My history teacher, Ms. Sullivan, who called me out on a conjectural point that I made before the entire class. She taught me that I need to back up my statements before they exit my mouth.
- My mom, she's a doctor who has access to a wealth of knowledge and references, and her medical advice helped me to explain why the problem is not of the mind, but of the body.
- Those of you who have defeated me in debate. I've taken every lesson that I've learned and tried my best to apply it here.
The actual essay begins below:
On Sleep and its Deprivation
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a teen feeble, faulty, and dull!
High school students are chronically sleep deprived which has serious academic, social mental and, general health consequences. For their lack of alertness, the students may very well be undead, and they suffer depression, anger, and poor academic performance. Though society may regard sleep as a luxury that the ambitious cannot afford [1], sleep is a necessary period during which the brain repairs itself and forms permanent memories, both of which are necessary for learning to occur. Walpole High School is by nature, a learning institution, and to ignore adolescents’ difficulties in learning early in the morning would be self-defeating. The solution is to change the start time of the high school to a much later hour, something already practiced in Sharon- in addition, it would improve the academic performance of elementary school children (who learn better earlier in the day), and increase safety by leaving teens more alert at the wheel or crosswalk.
Mary Carskadon from Brown University performed a study that lends weight to the point that teenagers are not at fault for their early-morning tiredness. She found that during puberty the sleep cycle shifts to around 11 PM, which leads to a significantly later natural wake-up time. In addition, Carskadon’s study found that teens are unable to fall asleep earlier even if physically exhausted, even with an appropriate time allowed for earlier sleep. However, teenagers are the least likely to obtain all the sleep they need, they average 7 hours each day during the school year. This, coupled with the fact that teenagers require 8.5 to 9.25 hours of sleep nightly [2] inhibits all higher functions.
Several studies mostly performed in public schools over the last two decades showed that changing the school start time to a later one has positive effects on students (7). In addition, a recent study from Brown University (6) showed that even a thirty-minute delay in start time resulted in 79% decrease in the number of students sleeping for less than seven hours on school nights and moved the number of those having more than eight hours of sleep from 16.4% to 54.7%. Daytime sleepiness, fatigue, depression, and tardiness decreased.
Landmark research from Minnesota (1996) led by Kyla Wahlstrom (9) studied a large population of 7000 students and 3000 teachers in two school districts, and 750 interviewed parents. There was a significant reduction in school dropout rates, fewer instances of depression, and higher grades. After the first year of the experiment 92% of interviewed parents stated they preferred later start times. Puberty, and thus delayed sleep cycles begin in middle school, and a 2004 Massachusetts study compared two middle schools head to head. One started at 8:37 AM and the other at 7:15 AM. The students who got up earlier were tardy four times as often as their peers in the “late“ school and their 8th grade transcripts showed significantly lower grades (1) The changes in school start time did have impact on length of extracurricular activities, sports, jobs etc. However, most parent s and coaches preferred the change because it gave them a chance to work with less tired students and there were fewer conflicts with adults.
Academic and athletic achievements are not all that is at stake. A study from Kentucky (1, 4) evaluated the effects of delays in high-school start time in terms of hours of sleep and motor vehicle crashes. A one-hour delay in the school start time resulted in an average one-hour increase in the nightly sleep of the students. The average rates for car crashes among teen drivers dropped 16.5% over 2 years of the study, compared to two years before the study. Furthermore, the incidence of car crashes increased by 7.8% in the rest of the state over the same period. However, this is not the only safety issue helped by later start times. Most high school students live in ‘latchkey’ arrangements, in which they finish school several hours before their parents arrive home from work. Police reports show that it is during the period between the end of school and the arrival of parents at home that teen crime rates are the highest (3). If school started later, teenagers would spend less time unsupervised, and therefore less time committing crime. In fact, this issue is so important that it has reached the national legislature.
Congress acknowledged sleep deprivation as a public health concern in 1999. Representative Zoe Lofren from California proposed a congressional resolution to encourage schools to delay start time to accommodate adolescents sleep demands. Resolution 135 or the “ZZZs to As” Act proposes that the schools will move their start time to no earlier than 8:30 AM. (5) This is hardly an unbeaten path; in many schools in this very state have adopted later start times. Ten schools in Boston have moved from a start time of 7:20 AM to a range of 7:45 to 8:30. Owing to their efforts, Walpole can draw on their experience, especially the neighboring Sharon High School, to implement this change. (10)
To conclude, Walpole’s students are depressed, numb and tired every morning. It is not their fault; their melatonin cycles have shifted, leaving them lagging behind everyone else. Early start times exacerbate this problem, and students must then cope with drowsiness, depression crime, death and maiming by horrific automobile crashes, and worst of all, reduced academic performance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
[1] "Sleep isn’t a priority for teenagers, and it typically isn’t made one by parents or schools."
--Jodi Mindell, PhD, Director of Graduate Program in Psychology, St. Joseph’s University, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
[2]
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/hot-topics/backgrounder-later-school-start-times[3] In one study, subjects were tested using the psychomotor vigilance task (Von Dongen et al., 2003, as cited in Walker, 2009). Different groups of people were tested with variable sleep times for two weeks: 8 hours, 6 hours, 4 hours, and total sleep deprivation. Each day they were tested for the number of lapses on the PVT. The results showed that as time went by, each group's performance worsened, with no sign of any stopping point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_debt[4]
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/hot-topics/backgrounder-later-school-start-times See ‘Changes in Melatonin’
[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Biological_clock_human.PNG[6] “…studies have shown that employers indicate a change in start times has not affected their business or the number of hours their student employees can work. They indicate that extra help is not usually needed until school gets out anyway, so they can easily adjust to the new schedule.”
[7]
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/school-start-time-and-sleep[8]
http://www.sleepfoundation.org/article/sleep-topics/school-start-time-and-sleep(1) National Sleep Foundation, “Backgrounder: Later School Start Times”
(4) Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Scientific Investigations, “Adolescent Sleep, School Start Times, and Teen Motor Vehicle Crashes” Fred Danner, Ph.D., Barbara Phillips, M.D., M.S.P.H.
(5) National Sleep Foundation, “School Start Time and Sleep”
(7) Wisconsin Medical Journal, ”Sleep, Sleepiness and School Start Times: A Preliminary Study”, Donn Dexter, M.D.; Jagdeep Bejwadia, M.D.; Dana Schilling; Gwendolyn Applebaugh, Ph. D.
(9) College of Education + Human Development, “LATER START TIMES FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS”
(10) FOCUS On Children Boston Public Schools, “Superintendent Contomapasis proposes later start times for 10 Boston high schools”
-Penguin
COPYRIGHT: Feel free to quote this essay and reproduce it at will. However, please credit my essay if you quote it, and ask for permission if you'd like to use it to make money.
