By Walt Warner
We have all experienced and most likely will experience some form of sleep deprivation in our lives, whether it’s late nights with friends or just the fact that you are unable to sleep there’s always a creeping sense of dread at the thought of school in the morning. According to the CDC sleep is important for many reasons, good sleep is needed for things like memory, learning, mental well being and academic performance.
According to PMC teenagers between the ages of 13-18 need roughly 8-10 hours of sleep every night. Benicia. Benicia High School starts at 8:30 this should give us more than enough time to sleep in, or does it? The reason I say this is because of the effects puberty has on teens; according to an interview with Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Laura Sterni “teens experience a natural shift in circadian rhythm,” usually making teens only tired around 11:00 p.m., this combined with daily stresses can usually make it difficult for students to get adequate sleep, there’s no surprise that the average sleep time for a teenager is often only 7-7.5 hours of sleep every night.
So this poses a question: what do we do? Kids aren’t getting enough sleep, do we change the school start time to make sure that students can learn to their fullest? Pushing the school start time to 9:00 would give kids more time to sleep and teachers to get ready for the morning easier. But this solution poses another problem: what are the parents supposed to do? What about the students who can’t drive yet and have to depend on a parent or sibling getting them to school? My Dad, for example, leaves for work at around 5:00 a.m. This isn’t a problem for me due to the fact I can just walk to school–but what about someone who can’t?
These difficulties could have a variety of different results, students don’t learn because they can’t get enough sleep and extending the school start time would make a morning commute to school more difficult, it seems the only way for students to learn to the fullest would be cutting out a chunk of time from school to get a decent amount of sleep but do it without disturbing learning or school work. Perhaps a chunk of time in access could work, students could be allowed to sleep for roughly 15-20 minutes during the access period where, over two days they would recover roughly 30 minutes of sleep. When proposing this I am not suggesting that this should be a mandatory “nap time” not every student is going to be tired, and they’d be free to do their work during this time.
It’s very important that students get enough sleep for learning and mental wellbeing. While I believe that having a chunk of time cut out for these students to sleep during access would be the best solution to this sleep deprivation problem, there are many solutions in this particular circumstance.
beniciapaw.com 