Education Week - March 27, 2013 - 13

EDUCATION WEEK

MARCH 27, 2013

www.edweek.org

Experts: Later School Start Helps Sleep-Deprived Teens
Symposium looks at
research, solutions
By Gina Cairney
Rockville, Md.

Mystery still surrounds what
sleep is actually for, but multiple
research studies suggest that it
is critical to brain development,
memory function, and cognitive
skills, especially among children
and teenagers, according to experts and advocates at a symposium here this month.
Organized by a pair of Maryland-based advocacy groups—the
Lloyd Society and Start School
Later—the event explored adolescents’ need for sleep, and the
consequences of and need for appropriate start times for schools
across the country.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact
benefits of later start times. But a
May 2012 study in Education Next
looked at more than 146,000 middle schoolers in the Wake County,
N.C., district and found that pushing back their start times an hour
increased standardized math and
reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile
points.
Although the sample is small,
the study’s main author, economist
Finley Edwards from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, said the
findings are significant enough to
be important, suggesting that later

start times can be a relevant policy
change for those districts trying to
find ways to improve students’ academic achievement.
Sleep deprivation is considered
a widespread, chronic health
problem among adolescents, according to the Arlington, Va.based National Sleep Foundation, and can have negative
effects on their cognitive development and cause mental and
emotional problems.
Experts recommend that highschool-age youths get around nine
hours of sleep per night, but the
reality is that many teenagers get
seven hours or less, according to
the sleep foundation.

Sleep-Wake Cycles
Sleep changes in adolescents are
“kind of a perfect-storm scenario,”
said Dr. Judith Owens, the director
of sleep medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, with many factors “conspiring
to increase the risks of insufficient
sleep in this population.”
As adolescents hit puberty, their
natural sleep-wake cycles begin to
shift, and they are unable to fall
asleep as early as they did when
they were in elementary school.
Hence, it’s normal for teenagers to
be awake until about 11 p.m., according to Dr. Owens.
But with some schools starting as
early as 7 a.m., that means many
teenagers aren’t getting the rec-

ommended nine hours of sleep for
proper rest and development.
As more research becomes available on the relationship between
adolescent sleep and school start
times, educators, parents, and students throughout the country are
taking steps to bring start times
into the spotlight.
When the school system in Arlington County, Va., first considered pushing back high school
start times in 1999, officials had
to take into consideration the
start times for all school levels and for outside programs
like child care, said Deborah
DeFranco, a supervisor for the
health, physical, and driver education department.
One of the challenges Arlington
County faced was competition for
interscholastic sports and facilities use. But after some trial and
error, Ms. DeFranco said, and
work with neighboring Fairfax
County, Va., and the Arlington recreation department to share facilities, educators were able to devise
a strategy that allowed everyone
to participate in something.
Around the same time Arlington was looking at the issue, Ms.
DeFranco said, other counties,
including Fairfax and Maryland’s
Montgomery County, were also examining their start times, but most
of those movements died. She credits Arlington’s success in changing
its school start times to the superintendent at the time, Robert

Smith, and a focused school board.
In Maryland, a bill was introduced in February to set up a task
force to study school start times
and sleep needs of adolescents.
The Maryland chapter of Start
School Later, a conference cosponsor and a national coalition
of parents, educators, students,
and professionals, started a petition specifically for Montgomery
County, to change schools’ start
times to 8:15 a.m. or later.

Health and Behavior
Michael Rubinstein, the public
coordinator for the organization,
said there’s an untapped interest
in the issue, and the online petition helped catalyze it.
“We need to start with the premise that ‘it must be done,’ ” said
Terra Ziporyn Snider, a medical
writer, historian, and co-founder
of Start School Later.
In Columbia, Mo., the board of
education voted 6-1 to delay start
times for the district’s high schools
after a grassroots effort led by Student’s Say, a student-run advocacy
group in the district, successfully
pushed to delay start times from
7:30 a.m. to 9 a.m., according to a
Start School Later press release.
When adolescents don’t get
adequate sleep, they experience
health problems, according to
the National Sleep Foundation,
including impaired alertness and
attention, which is important in

academics but also important for
those teenagers who drive to and
from school.
Sleep deprivation can also inhibit the ability to solve problems,
cope with stress, and retain information, and is often associated
with problems such as depression
and substance abuse.
The other conference co-sponsor,
the Silver Spring, Md.-based Lloyd
Society, which studies at-risk youths,
looked at whether sleep deprivation
had an impact on youth behavior.
According to Ann Gallagher, one
of the society’s principal investigators, statistics show that violent
crimes committed by teenagers
tend to occur when school is out for
the day, which implies that later
end times could narrow the opportunity for such crimes.
Studies show that insufficient
sleep was associated with a range
of risky behaviors, including substance abuse, sexual activity, and
aggression.
Dr. Owens of Children’s National
Medical Center suggested that
even a modest change, say 30 minutes, can improve teenagers’ sleep
habits, which then may have an impact on their health and academic
performance.
Teenagers have erratic sleep cycles, Dr. Owens said, and they try to
overcompensate during the weekend to “make up” for lost sleep, but
the cycle just keeps going. “They’re
in a semipermanent state of jet
lag,” she said.

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Education Week - March 27, 2013

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