The American Academy of Pediatrics says that middle and high schools should start at 8:30 or later. That would give students the right amount of sleep to be productive in school and improve their academics. Students will be more ready for school and more willing to work if they get to school later because they will get more sleep.

Adolescents(teens) are supposed to get around 9 hours of sleep to be able to be at their best. Which most teens get around 6 hours because of the work and activities that schools give them. The average amount of homework a student gets a week is around 10 hours. There are 120 hours a week, excluding weekends, we spend 30 hours a week at school and most kids either play a sport or work during the week which is around another 12 hours. If you get an average of 9 hours of sleep than that’s 45 hours a week of sleep. All together that’s only 33 hours a week where you have time to sit down and be a kid. Which seems like a lot but it’s really not when you think about it.

Sleep is vital to your well-being as important as the air you breathe, the water you drink and the food you eat better and manage the stress of being a teen. Biological sleep patterns shift toward later times for both sleeping and waking during adolescence, meaning it is natural to not be able to talk asleep before 11:00 p.m. Teens need about 8 to 10 hours of sleep each night to function best. Most teens do not get enough sleep, one study found that only 15% reported sleeping 8 ½ hours on school nights.

Students would also have to stay later in the day which could affect students’ jobs or important work they might have to do. Yet it would encourage bad habits because of current school start hours because they would stay up later. Also, people’s bosses or coaches could work around the late let out times.

One thing that I’m sure students wouldn’t be happy about if the day started later is staying at school later. Since we start at 7:42 and get out at 2:13 if we were to start an hour later at 8:42 we would leave school at 3:13 and at that time we only have about an hour of sunlight in the winter. And for all those kids who stay up until 1 a.m. on a school night now. They’d probably stay up until 2 a.m. because they know that school starts later so they can stay up later.