School Start Time Should be Pushed Back

Should schools start and end later in the day? Well it’s arguable both ways.  I think it would be better for school to start later, and there are many possibilities and pluses for schools starting later in day.

For example, there would be less tardies, people would sleep less in the earlier classes, and we get another hour of sleep. Well you may think, why not just go to sleep earlier? While this may be true, but some people have sports and homework and won’t get finished with all that till later hours of the night.

See, what most parents/teacher/adults don’t understand is that Middle and High School are very demanding. You are expected to wake up early, get ready, go to school, stay engaged, get out to do sports, go home to eat shower, and do your homework before doing this all over again. This obviously gets tiring at some point right? Exactly, and that’s why some students take days off to stay home quite frequently, which puts them a day behind, which they do more work and stay up even later.

Now, one may say, “Well, maybe they shouldn’t take a day,” but don’t you ever get so tired you’d take a day? But how will starting later help this any? Easily, see if we started school at 9 and students went to bed at midnight, they would still be getting roughly 8.5 hours of sleep while most teens are at 7- 7.5 hours of sleep.

That’s no good because we’d get out around 4:30. That’s better because students whose parents work can pick them up from school on their way home; they go home, eat, do some homework, then come back for sports. It may be late, but it’s cooler in the day, therefore practice won’t be so demanding in heat for spring and fall sports, and winter sports will be more enjoyable knowing that when you go home you can just shower then sleep. The conclusion of this piece is that it would be great to have school starting at a later time based on a lot of pros, and very few cons.