Should school start later?

Article 1

Let Them Sleep

Dr. Naomi Reyes is a pediatrician in practice for eighteen years and serves on the Ridgeline Public Schools health advisory committee.

1At puberty the body's clock moves. Melatonin, the hormone that brings on sleep, begins to be released about two hours later in an adolescent than in a child. This is not a habit, and it is not laziness. A fifteen-year-old sent to bed at ten will lie there. The American Academy of Pediatrics, reviewing this research, recommends that middle and high schools begin no earlier than 8:30 in the morning.

2Ridgeline's high school first bell is 7:15. The buses on the longest routes make their first stop at 6:05. Adolescents need eight to ten hours of sleep. In the district's own health survey last spring, 71 percent of high school students reported getting fewer than seven hours on a school night.

3We do not have to guess at what a later bell would do. Fairmont, one county over, moved its high school start from 7:20 to 8:35 in the fall of 2019. In the two school years that followed, unexcused absences at Fairmont High fell 18 percent. Over the same period, the county reported a 21 percent drop in traffic crashes involving drivers between sixteen and eighteen years old.

4The objection we hear is cost, and buses, and the sports schedule. These are real administrative problems and I do not dismiss the people who have to solve them. But they are schedules. Schedules can be rewritten. The hormone cannot.

5Every morning we wake several thousand young people in the dark and ask them to learn. We know what that costs them. We have known for a decade. The question in front of this board is not whether the research is sound. It is whether we are willing to be inconvenienced by it.

Article 2

The Cost of an Hour

Curtis Vann is a member of the Ridgeline Board of Education and served as the district's transportation director from 2004 to 2019.

1No one on this board disputes that teenagers need more sleep than they get. I have three of them at home. The question is not whether a later bell would help them. It is what a later bell costs, and who would pay it.

2Ridgeline runs 61 buses. Those 61 buses cover the whole district three times each morning: high school first at 6:05, middle school at 7:00, elementary at 7:55. One fleet, three runs. If the high school moves to 8:30, one of the other two tiers has to go first, which means five- and six-year-olds standing at the corner in the dark. Running all three tiers at once instead would take roughly 40 more buses and the drivers to go with them. The transportation office puts the recurring cost at $3.1 million a year, against a district budget of $94 million.

3Dismissal moves too, to about 4:10. The district emailed a survey to 3,400 families in March and 612 answered. Of those, 58 percent said a 4:10 dismissal would conflict with a student's after-school job, a younger sibling who has to be collected, or a parent's shift that cannot be moved. Our coaches point out that the practice fields have no lights and go dark by 5:30 in November.

4There are smaller things we could do and have not: a free first period for seniors who want it, a hard district cutoff on evening practice, a real limit on homework. None of these require a bus.

5Dr. Reyes calls the buses and the schedules an inconvenience. They are an inconvenience for this board. For a family working two jobs, and for a first-grader waiting at a corner at 6:15 in January, they are something else. A policy that helps teenagers by moving the cost onto younger children and onto the families with the least room to absorb it is not the good deed it looks like.