Sleepy students hope for later school day start times

By the time she starts school at 7:30 a.m., she is tired. It is not until the second or third period of the day that she can really focus on her classes.

‘‘Last term, I had math first period,” Margo said. ‘‘Sometimes we would have a test and I would still be drinking my coffee.”

Starting with the 2003-04 school year, Frederick County Public Schools moved start times at high schools from 8 a.m. to 7:30 a.m.

Recently, former Gov. Thomas Johnson High School student Jordan Miller reawakened the discussion and caused some parents and board members to look at the issue again.

Miller provided the board with studies showing that researchers have found the level of melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone, in teenagers rises later at night and stays high in the morning, meaning that teens are more likely to be tired and inattentive during early morning classes.

Another study conducted by the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota, also found that when high-schoolers started school later, they were less sleepy, more attentive and less likely to be late for school.

Those concerns have prompted the Frederick County Board of Education to reconsider start times for high schools.

Some parents, teachers and students support that idea.

‘‘I actually think it will benefit teenagers,” said Margo’s mother, Diane Enidez. ‘‘They end up being sleep-deprived.”

Enidez, who is also a mother of a middle-schooler, said she has noticed the difference in the sleep patterns of her 15-year-old daughter.

‘‘Margo stays up later than her brother and she gets up earlier,” Enidez said.

Enidez said parents of high-schoolers often discuss the issue and many would support the idea of a later school start, even if it means only 30 minutes.

The problem, according to some, is not that students can’t get to school by 7:30 a.m., but that some teens find it difficult to concentrate early in the morning.

Emily Rother, a senior at Frederick High, said she doesn’t mind the current start times, but many of her classmates do. ‘‘There is not much participation in the morning,” she said.

A later school start could give students a chance to actually wake up before they get to school, said Carol Pecora, an English teacher at Frederick High School.

Pecora said her students find it hard to concentrate during a first period class.

‘‘I’d spend most of the time waking them up,” she said. ‘‘I don’t think this works at all ... If you are tired, you just go through the motions.”

Typically, students are least focused in the first and fourth block of the day, Pecora said.

‘‘These are not college students,” she said. ‘‘By the fourth block, they get tired.”

The Board of Education may explore the issue in future meetings and are talking about conducting an anonymous survey of teachers and parents. The survey would try to determine if parents and teachers have noticed a decline in student performance since high schools adopted the 7:30 a.m. start time.

The idea for the survey came from board member Bonnie Borsa, the only board member who opposed the change to an earlier start when the vote was made in June 2003.

‘‘I think we made a bad decision,” Borsa said. ‘‘This issue raises its head every three or four months.”

The board discussed the survey at a planning session on Nov. 7, but board members decided to vote on the idea at a later meeting.

The Board of Education created different start times for elementary, middle and high schools in the 2003-04 school year. That allowed the system to use some buses for more than one school level and saved about $400,000, said Hal Keller, the system’s director for fiscal services.

At the request of the board, staff will check if shifting all start times to later in the day would increase the cost of transportation.

Board members have been hesitant to promise a change this year, when they are expecting the county to be getting less funding from the state.

‘‘I don’t want to decide now,” Borsa said. ‘‘We took all these other factors in consideration. We ought to go back and investigate.”

Pros and cons

Frederick County Public Schools administrators asked 15 high school principals and assistant principals to list pros and cons of pushing start times at high schools later.

Pros

Cons