While many high schools across the country continue to start classes around 7:30 a.m., some have broken tradition in order to allow their students more sleep in the morning hours, a time when adolescents are programmed to be sleeping rather than studying. According to the National Sleep Foundation, teenagers need more sleep than adults, and their bodies are designed to go to bed later and wake up later than younger children. Despite this fact, it has always been custom for high schools to start earlier than middle and elementary school.

Superintendent of the Hampden-Wilbraham School District, Dr. Paul Gagliarducci, said that the main reason the high school has not considered pushing the start time to later is because of cost concerns. “We’d need more buses, and that becomes costly. Also, we would have to consider how it would impact sports and after school activities,” said Gagliarducci.

As of now, the high school’s bells ring at 7:40, signaling the beginning of the 6 ½ hour school day, which ends at 2:10. Elementary school children start at 8:30, so if we were to move the start time to 8:00, the buses would only have about “15 minutes to go out into the town and bring kids to school, which is impossible,” said Gagliarducci. “Any drastic change in the time would affect the transportation of high school and elementary students.”

In addition, Gagliarducci said that if the high school were to start later, elementary school might have to start much earlier or much later to make up for the lack of extra transportation. This would leave young children waiting outside for school in either the morning darkness or afternoon darkness.

Principal Marty O’Shea said that while sleep deprivation at the school is evident to him every day, it would be very unlikely to consider changing the start time. “What’s good for teaching and learning should drive the decision, but you have to consider the cost of starting high school later in the day,” said O’Shea. “I think the jury is still out regarding whether it is better for high school students to start later in the day.”

Some high schools in Minnesota, as well as others around the country, have decided to push their starting times later in an effort to increase student involvement, attendance and grades, as well as provide their students extra time to sleep in the morning.

In 1996 and 1998, Edina and the Minneapolis, Minnesota adopted later school starting times because of “research from the state medical association about sleep deprivation and sleeping patterns.” According to research from the University of Minnesota, recent studies done in Minneapolis schools after the change in start times have shown positive results. There was a significant reduction in school dropout rates, less depression, and students reported earning higher grades; their high school starts at 8:30, rather than 7:25.

High schools in Georgia, Indiana, Virginia and Texas have also begun experimenting with later school start times, breaking away from tradition to respond to recent sleep research.

Gagliarducci said that even if the school started an hour later, there would be “a fairly significant amount of kids who would stay up later. I’m not sure it would guarantee kids would get an extra healthy hour of sleep.”

Not only that, but “you’d have to come up with a different way to run after school activities and athletics. Students go to school generally at the same time as parents, and I suspect that [different starting times] would be an issue,” said O’Shea.

While sleep needs and patterns in adolescents is not a new field of study in medicine, there has been an increased focus on sleep deprivation over the past few years. Researchers have begun to investigate into the tradition of starting high school classes earlier than elementary school. According to studies from sleep researchers at the College of the Holy Cross, teenagers’ bodies secrete the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin later than younger children and older adults, making the typical high school student's natural time to fall asleep past 11 p.m.

This may be the reason that high school students have so much trouble waking up at 6:00 or 7:00; their bodies are just not built to function properly that early. According to a PBS interview of Mary Carskadon, a leading sleep researcher at Brown University, teenagers need at least 9.25 hours of sleep at night, compared to the 7.5 to 8 hours that adults need.

“High school students have to wake up at the crack of dawn to get to school, when they’re the ones who really need to sleep later. Their biological clocks are built to go to bed later and wake up later, but in today’s society, they just can’t do that,” said school nurse, Denise McFarland, R.N.

According to an article by Tracy Jan in The Boston Globe on November 4, a pending measure calls for directing the Massachusetts Board of Education to encourage high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. “If that were the case, it would be partly my job to bring parents, students and teachers together to figure out how to make this work,” said O’Shea. “We would have to have a healthy discussion as to whether or not this would be good for Minnechaug, and that [the discussion] would be a positive thing.”

“It would be nice to not have to come into school until 9 in the morning, but the school has to think about so many other issues. It would no doubt affect sports, after school activities, jobs, and even parents’ schedules,” said McFarland.

O’Shea said that he believes a lot of people would be “understandably upset if the school were to change its starting time. I think when people hear about change, they naturally and initially recoil.”

Gagliarducci agrees that a change this big would be met with protesters who have strong opinions as to why high school’s bells should ring at 7:40 am. “I think you’d see a lot of organizations fighting it and a lot of state superintendents would be opposed to it,” said Gagliarducci. “It may seem like an easy question at first, but there are a lot of facts that need to be considered before the school could think about pushing back its start time any later than 8:00.”