Parents, students, and teachers often argue, with little evidence, that United States high schools start too early in the morning. Yes, starting school everyday at 8:30 am does sound nice, but there are many consequences to shifting the whole bell schedule such as disrupting extracurricular activities and changing around the whole bus schedules.
At Perry High School, if you have a 0 hour, school starts everyday at 6:30 am sharp. The school day doesn’t really start until the first class bell rings at 7:25 am.

Imagine the bell schedule had changed and school started everyday at 8:30 am. The predicted ending time for the day would be around 4 pm, which is when tutoring sessions would be wrapping up on a traditional schedule. For sports teams, they still usually have another hour of practice and end at 5 pm. With school starting so late, extracurricular activities would be really hard to squeeze into your schedule.

A lot of kids around the United States use school buses as their transportation to school everyday. However, some students don’t have availability to a school bus in their neighborhoods and have their parents take them to school. Normally, parents go to work early in the morning just like high school students currently do. If the schedule were to change and school did start later, this would just complicate the families’ lives more who can’t get their children to school at 8:30.

High school students already stay up late as it is, whether they are doing loads of homework or just messing around on their phone. Students could easily abuse the power of starting school later in the morning and stay up even later than usual. A big factor in students and how well they perform in school is the amount of sleep they get. With extracurricular activities lasting into the night and all the technology kids have now, it is hard to get them to go to sleep at a reasonable time.

The Chandler Unified District should just keep the bell schedule they have now for the sake of not having to deal with changing around all the bus schedules and complicating some parents’ lives.