1. WAKE UP! Washington Times article Page 1 of 5
WAKE UP!
High Schools Start Too Early
in Montgomery County, MD
go to: Rise and shine? Students go off to school too tired to learn
WAKE UP! Washington Times
Home
September 25, 2005
What we By Kathleen Maloney-Dunn
know
Sixteen-year-old Maddy Gunter of Great Falls pries herself out of bed weekday
News mornings at 5:15 to board her 6 a.m. school bus. The bus drops her at Fairfax
County's Langley High School at 6:50 a.m., and for the next half-hour before classes
Articles begin, she dozes with batches of other drowsy students lining the halls.
"Most of my friends are zombies the first half of the day; we're all on autopilot,"
e-mail Maddy says. Though she usually goes to bed by midnight, following three hours with
Network the cross-country team and hours of homework, many of her classmates go to bed
even later. Maddy reports a majority of students drink coffee and soda to stay awake
Useful Links in school, but many fall asleep in class anyway.
"Everyone's in a daze," she adds.
Meetings National Sleep Foundation surveys show 85 percent of American teens get less
than the minimum amount of sleep needed and 15 percent of high school students fall
Questions? asleep in class. The typical teen gets about seven hours of sleep on school nights
instead of the nine to 10 hours the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends.
I n the past decade, medical evidence has mounted that circadian rhythms shift
during puberty to a late-to-sleep and late-to-wake cycle. On average, adolescents
cannot fall asleep until about 11 p.m., when their bodies start releasing melatonin, a
naturally occurring hormone.
Because early start times conflict with this later sleep-wake pattern, several dozen
school districts nationwide, including Arlington, Alexandria and Falls Church, have
begun ringing morning bells later. Fairfax County, the nation's 12th-largest school
system, may soon do the same.
Studies have documented the positive effects of high schools switching to sleep-
friendly start times. Kyla Wahlstrom, director of the University of Minnesota's
Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI), extensively
researched Minneapolis-area schools that shifted bell times in 1996-1997 to 8:30 a.m.
or later.
Ms. Wahlstrom, who holds a doctorate in educational policy and administration,
says later start times yielded greater student wakefulness all day, teen feelings of
improved self-efficacy, easier-to-live-with teens, higher student alertness in the first
two hours of class, decreased depression, an upward trend in grades and fewer high
school dropouts.
The CAREI studies also discovered that later starts led to better attendance, less
tardiness, fewer discipline or mood problems, and one additional hour of sleep per
night. These benefits accrued to all students regardless of socioeconomic status,
which Ms. Wahlstrom says "makes sense because it is a matter of biology."
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2. WAKE UP! Washington Times article Page 2 of 5
An American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) report in the June 2005 Pediatrics
concludes, "Studies clearly suggest that shortened total sleep and irregular sleep
schedules are highly associated with poor school performance for adolescents." The
report identifies early school start times as a factor contributing to teen sleep
deprivation.
Primary author Dr. Richard Millman, co-chairman of AAP's Working Group on
Sleepiness in Adolescents, says the group's meta-analysis of hundreds of articles
"gives credibility to the effort to push start times back."
Co-author Dr. Carl Hunt, director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders
Research, adds, "There is this macho sense that if you're tough and you want to get
ahead, you can get by on less sleep, but that's just not true."
Area teens starting high school classes before 7:30 a.m. agree. In Fairfax County,
Langley High sophomore Lauren Radder says she falls asleep in class a couple of
times a week despite drinking coffee before boarding her 6:20 a.m. bus, sipping soda
during the day and napping after school.
When senior Megan Bane is asked how many of her schoolmates complain about
being tired, she laughs and says, "All of them. But kids go to the school nurse
because if you say you don't feel well, they let you sleep half an hour. Lots of kids do
this every morning."
In Montgomery County, where high school commences at 7:25 a.m., Bethesda-
Chevy Chase (B-CC) junior Lucy Bascom struggles out of bed by 5:45 a.m. to catch
her 6:45 a.m. bus. She admits to frequently nodding off in class. Kelsey Siegel, a
junior at Walter Johnson High, notices five or six students snoozing in each class.
The situation is different in Arlington County, where high schools do not start until
8:15 a.m. After a study indicated "starting school too early had a negative effect on
the academic achievement of high school students," Arlington moved start times 45
minutes later in 2001.
Chris Colt, Washington-Lee High School's nurse for seven years, estimates a 60
percent to 70 percent decrease in students coming to the clinic with health complaints
since the change. She says there has been significantly "less falling asleep in class,
less depression, less crankiness, less dragging around and looking tired."
Kathy Wills, director of planning and evaluation for Arlington schools, recently
analyzed survey results on the altered hours. Ms. Wills, who holds a doctorate in
program evaluation, says the percentages of students and teachers reporting that
students were ready to start school, prepared and alert for first period, and
participating in class discussions all increased the year after the bell change.
Teacher Catherine Colglazier is in her fifth year at the magnet Thomas Jefferson
High School for Science and Technology after 10 years at Fairfax County's McLean
High School. She calls high schoolers "The Starbucks Generation," noting that many
students drink coffee from nearby Starbucks and "pop caffeine" from school vending
machines.
"We shouldn't make them come to school so early," Ms. Colglazier says with a
sigh. "It's ludicrous to think they can focus to deconstruct a complex poem ... or take
a math test at 7:15 a.m."
The cities of Alexandria and Falls Church, like Arlington, recently restructured
school hours. Alexandria moved high school start times from 7:45 a.m. to 8:15 a.m.
in 2001, announcing it would "allow students extra sleep time, which research has
shown is critical to high school student performance."
John Porter, principal of Alexandria's T.C. Williams High School for 21 years, says
delaying bell times benefited the community. "Even a short period of time - half an
hour - makes a big difference. I see kids functioning better with the later start. There
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3. WAKE UP! Washington Times article Page 3 of 5
is less yawning and probably less tardiness now, and it seems the kids are more
attentive and ready to get on with the job."
Parental reaction to the change has been favorable, says Mr. Porter, noting that
parents were more concerned about keeping unsupervised teens out of trouble after
school than about early starts, so they like the later dismissal.
In Falls Church, the school board voted in March to start high school at 8 a.m. in
2005-2006. Approval of this quarter-hour delay was based partly on high schoolers'
sleep patterns.
This shift brings Falls Church closer to high school bell times in the District (8:30
a.m.), Prince George's County (7:45 to 9:30 a.m.) and Loudoun County (8:50 a.m.),
which are better synchronized with teen sleep rhythms.
Montgomery and Prince William counties, however, have thus far not pushed high
school times later. In Prince William County, a committee has been formed to
consider adjusting the 7:30 start time, but no decision has been reached.
Montgomery County addressed start times in 1998 through a Bell Times Study
Group. Though the Board of Education recognized research suggesting teenagers
were at risk for sleep deprivation, no changes were made.
Board-certified sleep doctor Helene Emsellem of Chevy Chase is convinced the
only way to fix teen sleep deprivation is to start high schools later.
"When we look back in 10 years and think about the education they could have had
and the problems we had dealing with irritable teens, we'll wonder what we were
doing - it's so physiologically incorrect to have teens waking up at 6 for school," Dr.
Emsellem says.
Dr. Emsellem rattles off a list of problems adolescent sleep deprivation causes -
mood disorders, suicidality, obesity, type 2 diabetes, acne, an inability to learn and a
"spectacular incidence of fatal accidents in drivers under age 25."
Cornell University psychology professor James Maas, author of "Power Sleep,"
enumerates other side effects of poor sleep - illness; use of caffeine, nicotine and
other stimulants; and teens "burnt out" before college. "Starting high schools later is a
tremendously important piece of the pie," Mr. Maas says.
He explains that functional MRI brain scans show the brain fails to properly "light
up" while performing mental tasks after minimal sleep deprivation. "You can't teach
kids whose brains are shut down," he says. "We are just wasting educational dollars.
It's like taking hundreds of educational dollars in your hand and setting a match to it."
Dr. William C. Dement, world-renowned Stanford University pioneer of sleep
medicine, declares, "Nobody understands that adolescents are out of sync with their
circadian rhythms when high schools and middle schools start so early and that this
really does cause sleep deprivation."
Fairfax County is seeking to solve this problem. In February, the Fairfax County
School Board approved $150,000 for a consultant to analyze cost-effective ways to
align bell times with student sleep cycles.
The biggest obstacle is the multitiered bus schedule in the county, where
approximately 1,100 buses take three hours to shuttle more than 101,000 students
each morning.
Dean Tistadt, assistant superintendent of transportation for Fairfax County schools,
says one advantage of picking up high schoolers first is that buses can drop them off
unsupervised and proceed immediately to other runs, whereas middle and elementary
students must sit on buses until supervision is available.
"I like the notion of high school going later. I think it's a great idea," Mr. Tistadt
says, "but we need someone to come in here and figure out the different runs and
configurations."
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4. WAKE UP! Washington Times article Page 4 of 5
Fairfax County School Board member Stuart Gibson confides, "We are not helping
middle and high school kids by starting so early. ... Adolescent health and academic
achievement are very, very powerful goals we ought to be working toward. But we
don't want to achieve this at the expense of other issues important to families," such
as class size, teacher salaries and cutbacks in extracurricular and academic programs
to offset the cost of busing changes.
Pressure on school boards intensifies as researchers illuminate problems caused by
inadequate sleep. The recent spate of teenage driving fatalities in Washington's
environs may further motivate local schools to adjust morning bells for groggy teens.
However, delaying start times is not a panacea for sleep debt in teens navigating a
world filled with round-the-clock Internet, computer and video games, television, cell
phones, instant and text messaging, and other technologies.
Mary A. Carskadon, director of the E.P. Bradley Hospital's Sleep Research
Laboratory and a psychiatry professor at Brown Medical School, concludes, "My
colleagues and I think the greatest gap in education is about sleep. It should start in
kindergarten. The true base of the health pyramid is sleep. ...
"There's no time to catch up on weekends, or even to be young," continues Ms.
Carskadon, who holds a doctorate in neuro- and biobehavioral sciences.
Perhaps this is why Langley High graduate Carina Reichelt muses, "When my
friends and I talk or think about college, all we say is, 'Aahh, sleep.'"
Caption:
Lucy Bascom, a junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, heads to her first-
period Advanced Placement English class, where she says she frequently struggles to
stay awake after rising at 5:45 a.m. to catch the 6:45 school bus. [Photo by Michael
Connor/The Washington Times]; Maddy throws on a sweatshirt near her unmade bed
at 5:45 a.m. after rising around 5 with less than five hours of sleep. Her mother,
Pattie Gunter, helps her get out the door and takes her to meet the bus. [Photo by
Michael Connor/The Washington Times]
Below: Langley High School junior Maddy Gunter, 16, leaves her home in Great
Falls in the dark to board her school bus around 6 a.m. and arrive a half-hour before
the 7:20 start of classes. [Photo by Michael Connor/The Washington Times]; Lucy
Bascom, a junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, says she frequently nods off
in class after getting up at 5:45 to catch a 6:45 school bus. Her sleepiness shows in
her first-period Advanced Placement English class. [Photo by Michael Connor/The
Washington Times]
"Most of my friends are zombies the first half of the day; we're all on autopilot,"
Maddy Gunter (second from left) says about the effects of an early start time for
school. Here, Maddy listens to instructions for an after-school cross-country workout
with (from the left) Morgan Cofer, 17, Joe Sanson, 15, Libby Boccarosse, 15, and
Charlotte Ryland, 15. [Photo by Liz O. Baylen/The Washington Times]
Copyright 2005 News World Communications, Inc.
Record Number: 200509261137280038
Link to the Washington Times
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5. WAKE UP! Washington Times article Page 5 of 5
This page last revised on November 6, 2005
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