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.

80% of schools around the U.S start before 8 a.m., which means that many students that will be attending those schools will windup sleep deprived. Waking up early in the morning has began to raise a red flag to parents and doctors noticing a decrease in academic success. I don’t think school needs to start at 10am but maybe 8:00 or 8:30 which would gives students almost an extra hour and a half of sleep depending on when you wake up to get ready.

School districts are expecting students to come to school for about seven hours and then send you home with about two to three hours of homework. After a while of that on repeat students are going to have a tough time staying on task in school and a tough time actually learning. I know for many students there’s only so much work you can do until you start to lose your mind.

Not to mention studies have linked students who don’t get enough sleep to drug and alcohol abuse and higher suicide rate. If that doesn’t light up your eyes with a problem I don’t know what will.

I know students have to realize that you will always have homework and always will have those days when you are just worn out from work but you just have to keep on going. But when you’re waking up around five to six a.m. every morning good luck… “You’re going to be worn out after a while.”

For students with health risks, this can have serious consequences with their mental and physical well being. Knowing friends and fellow students with any type of health problems, I have seen first hand that early mornings and a lot of homework on weeknights do not mix well. If you don’t have any health risks you are still at risk, Rep. Zoe Lofgren stated “overtime, sleep deprivation leads to serious consequences for academic achievement, social behavior, and the health and safety of our nation’s youth.”

Physicians have recommended that teens should get at least 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep per night. I wish I could get that much sleep per night. If the academic success is down, students are sleeping more than learning and doctors are finding correlations of sleep deprivation to drug and alcohol use, why not make a change to the bell schedule.