Newburyport School District will be changing their school start times in the fall of the 2018-19 school year, pushing out their start times by 30 minutes.

Across the nation, high schools have taken expert advice and pushed their start times out to later in the morning. The studies’ results have all shown that high school students quality of sleep plays an important role in the level of depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescents. Newburyport School District has now decided to help the sleep deprivation, stress, and depression in their high school, and will be starting school later beginning next fall.

“The idea of starting school later was a really parent-driven idea,” said Lynne Cote, Librarian and school committee member at Newburyport High School. “A group of parents came to the committee with the idea because of their child’s stress and depression that they believed was caused by a lack of sleep.”

Cote is also a mother of a senior student athlete at Newburyport High School, but she claims that as beneficial as it is for students mental and emotional health, it pushes the whole day out and eliminates a lot of students time that would be used for homework. “Sports would also be greatly affected in the later school start time,” said Cote. “Practices would go later, some kids would need to be dismissed for away games. We would even need to cut  golf and all co-op programs since the strict practice times for those sports couldn’t be manageable with school hours ending later.”

Cote also went on to explain how there is a lot of evidence that having these later starts for the high school students is very beneficial, but there is no research done for elementary students who will also be part of the 30 minute time change as well. “For some parents of our elementary school students, they will need to find child care in the mornings now since these kids won’t be going off to school until 9:00 when most parents would already have gone off to work,” Cote said. “This later school start time is really just to accommodate the high school students needs and hopefully make more students on time for school.”

The Triton Voice also reached out to our own school and spoke with Superintendent, Brian Forget, and math teacher, Kathy Norton asking their own opinions on Triton starting school at a later time.

“There has been no formal proposal or review of implementing a later start time here at Triton,” said Forget. “It would be very challenging as well due to the fact that we would need to double the number of buses in the district if we brought the elementary, middle and high school in at the same time. The other option would be to swap times with the elementary schools.”

Forget said that doubling the number of buses would be extremely expensive and cost prohibitive, and the other option of switching the times of the schools would really complicate things.

Norton voiced a strong opinion on the topic saying that she would be very upset if they were to change the school start times until later. “Most of the students here are very involved with activities, sports, or even jobs outside of school,” said Norton. “It would be a horrible idea to ever change the school start times to later. Students always seem to do the best work in their morning classes and by the time lunch comes around they just want to go home.”

Both Forget and Norton said that homework will always be the same number of hours and changing the time to make school get out later would just mean kids would be staying up later to finish homework.

“Both schools (Masconomet and Newburyport High Schools) are looking at the option,” said Forget. “We’ve decided to take a “wait and see” approach, seeing how they are able to proceed, as well as the pros and cons if they are able to make it work.”  

Newburyport High School will be making their final decisions in December when the school committee makes their final votes on the issue.