|
|
If it's first period, I must be sleeping!September 2005 - Later School wishes a good start to the new school year to all our visitors and a gentle transition to those alarm clocks.
Read the story and see the documents behind our efforts here in West Windsor and Plainsboro, New Jersey to get our middle and high schools to start a bit later in the day. We succeeded in gaining a few minutes for three years, but then our schools reverted to earlier start times as they moved to a block schedule.
You can see the current start times here; the high schools now start at 7:40 and the middle schools at 7:43. For three years, under "later school," they've started at 7:49 and 7:50, respectively. Prior to that, high school started at 7:34 and middle school at 7:40.
Schools Original Start Time
pre-2000After Later School
2000-2003After Block Scheduling
2003...High schools 7:34 7:49 7:40 Middle schools 7:40 7:50 7:43 Our story and the resources we consulted may be interesting to you if you are trying to implement later start times in your schools.
March 2003 - The Later School Team is disappointed in the decision of the WW-P School Board to return to earlier start times for the 2003-2004 school year. We hope there will be educational benefits from the new block scheduling, but we wish we were not returning to an earlier start to the school day. We are also concerned about the logistics of the single lunch period for 1400 students.
November 5, 2002 - Today's New York Times features an article on teenage sleep deprivation and school start times called Sleep Is One Thing Missing in Busy Teenage Lives. It includes comments by Mary Carskadon, Ph.D., editor of the recently published Adolescent Sleep Patterns: Biological, Social, and Psychological Influences.
August 26, 2002 - This site and many other useful sites are listed as resources on "Block Scheduling, School Schedules and the Use of Time in Schools" by the Connecticut Department of Education. The entire bibliography is available in PDF format here.
April 4, 2002 - Article on the successful efforts of the Later School is Better committee in WW-P, from the website Connect for Kids.
February 27, 2002 - Transcript of Washington Post chat with Sarah Spinks, Director of PBS's Inside the Teenage Brain, including question from Deb on adult attitudes toward teen sleep needs.
February 1, 2002 - Last night as part of their Frontline series, PBS aired Inside the Teenage Brain. This fascinating show contained a segment on later school start times featuring interviews with lead sleep researchers Kyra Wahlstrom and Mary Carskadon.
May 7, 2001 - Star-Ledger article on how difficult it is to push back school start times, featuring story of success in WW-P (no longer available online)
August 22, 2000 - Later School's campaign is featured in the lead article on WebMD: click here (if you have a WebMD account) or here (if not) to read it!
May 23, 2000 - WW-P high schools, middle schools and UES will start later in September 2000!
The board of education has voted 9-0 in favor of starting the UES, the middle schools, and the high schools later next year! The change is 15 minutes later for the UES and the high schools, 10 minutes later for the middle schools (but considering they originally proposed starting middle school five minutes earlier next year, we consider this a 15-minute change as well).
The new school times will be as follows:
High schools 7:49 am 2:42 pm Middle schools 7:50 am 2:42 pm UES 8:50 am 3:10 pm Elementary school times (K-3) are not changing. See a chart comparing the old and new start times here.
Obviously this is not a MAJOR improvement, but it is a step in the right direction. If all goes well and people are pleased with this plan and see that our extracurricular programs are not destroyed, we will be well positioned to seek another 15 minutes (or more) when the new elementary school comes online in 2002. Dr. Fitzsimons has told us schedules for the entire district will necessarily change at that time. Meanwhile, we will try to reach out to nearby school districts. If we can get some regional coordination happening on this issue, we stand a far better chance of making a more significant change.
Thanks to all of you who wrote, called, emailed, and came out to meetings in support of this change. This was definitely a grassroots effort and we can all be proud that we achieved at least some modicum of victory. As I told the reporters, perhaps even more important than the fifteen minutes we won is the symbolic value of the board's action. For the first time, they are acknowledging that teenagers' sleep needs should be taken into consideration when devising school schedules. This we believe is a major accomplishment!
We still feel that the new start times of 7:49 for the high schools and 7:50 for the middle schools are far too early. We are continuing to encourage our school board and administration to keep this issue in mind as our district completes its build-out by bringing our fifth and last elementary school online in September 2002. At this time, all our school hours will have to be changed, so we feel this is will be a great opportunity to push back school hours even further, certainly past the 8:00 hour.
Please read and sign our guestbook. Let us know if you have further information to share. We occasionally add links to new articles.
You can also read our original letter to the West Windsor Plainsboro Board of Education, which was also published in the Princeton Packet. The Packet ran an article about our campaign on November 12, 1999, and we have also received coverage in the West Windsor Plainsboro News Eagle, the Trenton Times, and the Newark Star-Ledger.
Follow the links below to read some of the current research and find out why Later School is Better. If you need to download Adobe's free Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, you can do so here.
A coalition of school districts in the greater Minneapolis area (city and suburbs) significantly pushed back their school start times two years ago, based on this, the definitive study of later school start times for adolescents. Two years later, even people who were skeptical have been completely won over by the new schedules. Read the Executive Summary of the Minnesota School Start Time Study.
Many medical and education professionals are recognizing the need for later school start times:
PBS's Frontline series episode Inside the Teenage Brain. contains segment on later school start times featuring interviews with lead sleep researchers Kyra Wahlstrom and Mary Carskadon. "On My Own Time: The Conflict Between Adolescent Sleep Needs and High School Start Times," University of Maine, 2002 (PDF format) "Sleep Needs, Patterns and Difficulties of Adolescents: Summary of a Workshop," National Academies Press 2000, online conference SchoolBehavior.com has some advice about medications and sleep and some suggestions for teachers of sleepy students. "How much sleep does an adolescent need?," Read what pediatrician Alan Greene, whose website gets over a million hits a month, has to say about teens, sleep and school. "Dozing Off in Class," study by the National Sleep Foundation "Sleep Patterns Among Adolescents," from University of Indiana, with bibliography "It's time to make time for learning," from Education World (magazine for school administrators) There are hundreds of insightful posts, most of them by tired students, on the Family Education Network's SnoozingTeens message board. "Sleep, Safety, Drugs, Teen Pregnancy, and Other Reasons to Change School Times ," National Center for Policy Research for Women and Families. The media are also picking up the story:
"Sleep Needs, Patterns and Difficulties of Adolescents: Summary of a Workshop" (2000), from the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Academy Press "Sleepy Teen Troubles," ABC News "Research on adolescent sleep," from a school district in California (PDF format) "Why are students so tired?", Neuroscience for Kids "Are your students sleep deprived?" Education World "It's About Time (and Sleep):
Making the Case for Starting School Later," Education World"Some School Districts Addressing Teen Sleep Deficit Later Starting Times Help Students Catch Up ," WebMD (mentions WW-P) The New York Times ran a cover story on too-early school start times, "Early to Rise Makes a Teen-Ager TIRED," in a recent issue of their Education Life supplement. A must-read! "In the Dark: For years, high schools have rung their starting bells earlier and earlier. Only recently have sleep researchers grasped the effects on students," Washington Post Family Education Network's Teen Sleep Poll (only 3% of over 8,000 parents polled said their teens would wake up in time for school without an alarm clock; 82% said they would sleep till at least 9 a.m. if allowed to wake naturally) "Adolescent Sleep Needs and School Performance," New York State United Teachers (teachers' union reveals that a later school day results in more student learning, greater scheduling flexibility, improved student health and behavior, increased attendance, and better teacher attitudes!) "Totally Wasted," Salon. This article draws on the research of Leon Botstein and questions much about the structure of the modern American high school. To research it, the author taught in a high school for three weeks. "To teach my three-week course, I arrived at 8:05, sleepy, met with 37 sleepy juniors and seniors for about 45 minutes and then 32 more sleepy juniors and seniors for another 45 minutes." The kids described days of "endless...bus rides, homework and exhaustion; they longed for more sleep and less change in the schedule, for more frequent but shorter breaks." Food for thought. "Getting Enough Sleep: You've Got to be Dreaming!," PBS TeacherSource "Teenage Sleep Deprivation," essay by Hunterdon County (New Jersey) student "Dozing Off in Class? Poll Shows U.S. Children Complain of Daytime Sleepiness, Fall Asleep at School," Kidsource Results of School Start Time survey by University of Akron (only 15% of those surveyed thought school should start prior to 8 a.m.) "What can the study of work scheduling tell us about adolescent sleep?" study reported in Contemporary Perspectives on Adolescent Sleep "Wake-up call for sleepy teen: Studies show adolescents need at least nine hours of rest daily and most aren't getting it," Cincinnati Enquirer "Teens, Sleep & School," Parent News Online School Bell Time Resources 1999 Omnibus Sleep in America Poll (from National Sleep Foundation) "Sleepy Teenagers Lack Focus," The Times of India. Yes, it's an international problem! "Sleep in Teens," Thinkquest "Poor sleeping habits natural for teenagers," International Child and Youth Care Network "Sleep and School Performance," The Parent Report "From Z's to A's: Kids Need More Sleep," WebMD/MSN Health "Teen Sleep Deprivation a Serious Problem," WebMD/MSN Health article mentions WW-P campaign "Those sleepy excuses for bad grades may really be true!" Florida newsletter "Study Links Early School Start Times, Teen Auto Accidents," U.S. Newswire "Sleep deprivation may be undermining teen health," American Psychological Association "High schools wake up to later start time idea," The Oregonian "Later School Start Times," Schoolrenewal.org (program of the US Department of Education) "Coaches to fight later school start," St. Petersburg Times. Football coaches are often very powerful figures in a school district, and they are almost always against later school start times.
| Brown University School of Medicine Sleep and Chronobiology Lab -- this is where Professor Mary Carskadon works | Sleepless at Stanford: What All Undergraduates Should Know About How Their Sleeping Lives Affect Their Waking Lives, by William Dement, M.D., Ph.D | National Sleep Awareness Week |
| American Academy of Sleep Medicine | Sleep Research Society | National Sleep Foundation |
| "Contemporary Perspectives on Adolescent Sleep," papers from 1997 conference | Adolescent Sleep Needs and Patterns, report from the National Sleep Foundation (PDF format) | Journal Sleep (Official Publication of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC |
Fill out Sleep for Science's
First
Bell Survey!
