need around 8.5-9.25 hours of sleep each night. (“Wake up Calls (Fast Facts)”).“Students who get about 8.5-9.5 hours of sleep each night can improve their health, safety, academic performance, and quality of life” (“Schools Start Too Early”). Students who receive few hours of sleep are more prone to put themselves in dangerous situations. Some of these dangers are using drugs, drinking alcohol, being overweight, and performing poorly in school. (“Schools Start Too Early”). As stated before, enough sleep will decrease the risk of student’s putting themselves in dangerous situations. Sleep is necessary for your body to perform certain bodily functions and for brain activity to occur. Sleep also prevents drowsiness and falling asleep in dangerous situations (¨Teens and Sleep¨). Poor sleep causes someone to not get along with their family and friends and perform poorly in school (¨Teens and Sleep¨). With drowsiness comes a harder time paying attention, especially when in school. A person who is sleepy will most likely focus on trying to fall asleep instead of the lecture. Being sleepy can make you more prone to get into a car accident. There are over 100,000 car crashes a year because of people who fall asleep while driving. Car crashes are deadly, and with over 100,000 car crashes there is most likely people who are injured, or in a worst case scenario, someone may die (“Teens and Sleep”). A point against this argument is that people can run on the few hours of sleep they get, meaning that some people don´t need a full 8-9 hours to get up and function in the morning/day. A person can make it through the day driving and working and learning and helping without the recommended amount of sleep Although this is the case, their body and their brain still won´t be functioning properly, even if they think they are functioning normally. Their brain will still have not gotten the right amount of sleep to perform its necessary functions. They also will be putting themselves in more danger since they are still technically sleep deprived.
Students who get the recommended amount of sleep not only can become better academic achievers, it will also improve their academic performance (¨Schools Start Too Early¨). To recall, not getting enough sleep will cause a student to be drowsy. That student may then fall asleep during class and miss important information. This'll cause the student to do poorly on the homework or on a test given for the subject he/she slept through.
¨Scientists have consistently found a constellation of sleep factors—earlier bedtimes, more total sleep, and later rise times—associated with superior academic performance and higher grades¨ (¨Academic Performance¨). Students who get more sleep at night tend to perform better in schools than students who get less sleep. Earlier bedtimes allow your body to perform its necessary functions earlier and later rise times allow you to feel relaxed when you wake up.
Academics may increase, but time for sports and activities will decrease as students with later school start times will have later school end times, or an athlete may have to leave their class early to make their game (¨Eight Major Obstacles to Delaying School Start Times¨).
While this is a concern to a lot of high schools and to a lot of athletes in high school, the schools that have implemented a later start time have seen few problems in after school activities (¨Eight Major Obstacles to Delaying School Start Times¨). Schools will reschedule the practices, allow practice to run a little later than normal, and match times are changed to meet the student's needs (¨Eight Major Obstacles to Delaying School Start Times¨). Students who get more sleep are more likely able to finish their homework early, allowing time for after school activities (¨Eight Major Obstacles to Delaying School Start
Times¨).
In conclusion, schools should implement a later start time for higher schoolers since high schoolers would get around the recommended amount of sleep, preventing sleeping in school and high schoolers academics and safety will increase, since they will get enough sleep to study before school and prevent drowsiness. Schools with a later start time will allow students to be more academically successful. With a later start time comes better sleep, which will allow students to be better decision makers and allow students to stay away from doing things that harm them. In order for high schools to implement later start times, people need to take action and speak to school officials. Parents need to let the officials know of the benefits and get doctors and those educated in this study to let schools also know of the benefits that later school start times can bring.