<p>I don’t think that going to bed late is a time management issue. I personally am more comfortable staying up late and waking up late. Even if I wake up early I will not feel sleepy at 10pm. During school I would usually go to bed at 1or 2am and wake up at 7am. This is partly because I would not get home from my extracurriculars until 5 or 6pm and I would still have to eat dinner, bathe, do homework, babysit etc.
During the summer I usually sleep from 3am to 2pm. Even when I do not stay out late I don’t feel the urge to sleep until after midnight. This of course is an issue when I have school/work because then I only get 4-5 hours of sleep a night. </p>
<p>I usually wake up 1.5hrs before school just to give my time to do my hair and makeup. I lived 6 minutes away from my school and I never had time to eat breakfast. My private school started at 8:15am, local public schools started at 9am.</p>
<p>I wonder whether there have been any studies comparing teens who play sports with those who don’t, to see whether the active ones have less difficulty with an early sleep schedule. </p>
<p>I don’t know if anyone has brought this up yet:
Varying start/end times are relative… Normally I go to bed between 10 and 11, and go to school at 7:30. If I go to school at 8:30, I’ll go to bed between 11 and 12. There are only 24 hours in a day. </p>
<p>“S is at a charter that starts at 8:40 am and all the after school activities are built into the daily schedule. When they are released at 3:40, they’ve already had their sports practices and club meetings etc.” How is this possible? That sounds like a schedule that doesn’t have much spare room to meet instructional hours requirements. My daughter’s sports practice is 2 hours long, every day; her school days currently run 8:55-6 and will be 8-6 some days once the morning clubs get going. And there are plenty of more time-consuming EC’s she could be in. We have some club time in school (if the kids skip lunch) but it isn’t nearly enough and the serious clubs also meet before or after school.</p>
<p>@mathyone It’s a project based charter school that runs quite differently. They have 4 academic classes a day which are actually longer blocks of time than your traditional school would schedule for core academics. They don’t offer graded electives… instead that time is set aside for sports, academic teams and clubs of a student’s choosing and they can switch them around each quarter if they so choose. Certain seasonal sports are offered but it’s more recreational… competes against other charters as opposed to the larger high school leagues. Instead of having sports champions, this school has national robotics and science team winners. They don’t have an orchestra but they take trips to Japan and build working hover crafts. If a student has particular interests, they work them into their projects. It’s something you have to see in action to really get. It’s not a school for football players who want to continue on in college. It’s a school for academics and when you send your kid there, you know it’ll be up to you do find them an orchestra if they want to play music (and in our area, it’s easy to find high quality outside school alternatives.)</p>
<p>Just pointing out that there are schools that manage later start times without keeping kids until night falls. Personally, my kids tend to be disappointed in the quality of school activities and much rather pursue those interest on the outside.</p>
<p>I’m all for encouraging academics over sports, but our state has minimum requirements of instructional hours and credits earned as well as many specific course requirements outside of core academics (PE, health, and several different non-core classes).</p>
<p>Those are taken care of and follows state regulations as well (which are pretty stringent in our state.) PE can be gained through school sports or through independent study. My S takes care of PE through Tae Kwon Do and Basketball which he devotes many hours to each week. There is a ton of cross-over in subjects which really is a more natural way to learn. Health is taken care of within biology. Computers, what they do with technology on a daily basis more than takes care of that requirement. There is very little wasted time and they are actually IN school longer hours than is typical in our county. This school is nationally recognized and gets heavily recruited by schools like Stanford, MIT and the likes. They don’t even offer AP’s or use textbooks but 99 percent go to 4 year colleges with unusual amounts going to highly selective colleges. It’s not for everyone. My eldest wouldn’t have loved the project-based learning set-up but she also went to an alternative high school that only offered English and Social Studies. Everything else was through the community colleges. Traditional schools could use some flexibility and shaking up in my opinion. I was skeptical in the beginning but after seeing them done well, I’m surprised that society still clings to a model that was designed to prepare children for factory work.</p>
<p>In my school district, many people take public transportation as its relatively convenient and runs on one main route (That connects to almost every street, as its a post-2000 built suburb). Reading the comments here makes me wonder how it could take 30-45 minutes to drive to school? If you drove that much here, you’d drive through 2-3 different high school zones. There are a lot of apartments right next to the school, so a lot of people (Including me) just have a short walk to school. Keep in mind, this isn’t much of an urban area. Urban Planning where you guys live really needs to be improved. </p>
<p>My school started at 7:20 and we didn’t even have any sports!
But I know we had to start at that time because of the buses. There weren’t any homes near the school and the only way to walk to school would be crossing a highway.</p>
<p>I have 2 kids and I agree that the late starting kid did better than the earlier starting kid. One started at 7:30, often went to school sleepy, so grades were affected. The other one started school later by half an hour at 8:00am, she were not sleepy when she got to school and did much better in school.</p>
<p>"Reading the comments here makes me wonder how it could take 30-45 minutes to drive to school? "</p>
<p>In our case, it is a magnet HS that serve the whole city. It’s about a 20 minute drive. The bus, however, takes at least 30 minutes. Varies by year. One year my kids were one of the last stops and it was about 25-30 minutes. This year it’s more like 40-50 minutes–we are one of the early stops. Obviously, the bus, which stops for many kids, is going to take longer than driving.</p>
<p>I live in the South so things tend to be very spread out. Many kids live farther away from their schools than we do, especially if they are in a specialized program of some sort and not just at the school they are zoned for.</p>
<p>“Reading the comments here makes me wonder how it could take 30-45 minutes to drive to school?”</p>
<p>My daughter’s bus pickup junior year was 55 minutes before class starts. I think the first stop on her route was an hour before. Terrible planning in transportation department. This isn’t a regional magnet or anything. Just our local public school and plenty of people live farther away than we do. </p>
<p>The issue isn’t just hours of sleep. I agree that if you start school later, and you have an average public school with sports and extracurriculars, you aren’t helping anyone who gets too few hours of sleep.</p>
<p>What you are doing is recognizing that the sleep needs of teens change:</p>
<p>such that they really can’t fall asleep before 11 pm. That gives 8 hours of sleep, if you can wake up at 7 am, but the early start times cut into that, plus teens need at least 9 hours of sleep.</p>
<p>For my son’s school, they switch classes around because they have longer and shorter periods each day, and the longest periods are first thing and right after lunch - the two sleepiest times of the day. That means that the most important activities such as tests and labs are always in those slots. Whoever thought that up must have been a genius, or one of those 6 am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed folks.</p>
<p>Colleges usually have the flexibility to start classes at 9 am or later. I remember a rare 8 am recitation, and not only was half the class late, but most people were sleeping through it. The 10 am recitation was like every other class, most people on time and alert.</p>
<p>" they really can’t fall asleep before 11 pm."</p>
<p>Not buying it. My daughter went to sleep at 10 for more than half of her high school career. Wasn’t routinely staying up past 11 until senior year when she was extremely busy and didn’t have as much going on before school that year. And we have a late start time school. My freshman is more of a morning person and has been going to bed at 9-9:30 because she often has to get up around 6 or often just can’t sleep late. One good sleeper and one poor sleeper, both going to sleep before 11 pm.</p>
<p>There is a difference between gaining the ability to stay up later at night (as opposed to little kids who may just fall asleep anywhere once it gets late) and not being able to go to sleep until midnight. </p>