Students are required to make the difficult conversion every year from waking up far past noon to rising practically at the crack of dawn. At least, that’s how it feels when adjusting one’s schedule to early school start times. As the year wears on, students don’t truly become accustomed to the early mornings, but instead, they just learn how to run on less and less sleep.

School start times should be pushed back at least to 8:30 a.m.  because of a general improvement in each student’s health, well-being, behavior and grades.

At least five days a week, 180 days a year, students are subject to the horrendous buzz of an alarm clock telling them to “rise and shine!” for an exhaustion-filled day at school. They drag themselves out of bed in order to spend the day trying to concentrate and fight the urge to zone out or sleep. Many students simply can’t fight this urge, and therefore end up not learning information that they very much need. This, in turn, results in poor grades or even unfinished work when students forgo their homework in favor of much-needed sleep.

In contrast to students who feel the need to nap during the day, some teens find that sleep deprivation affects their behavior. Instead of passively floating through the day, many teens will experience irritability, a short temper or even depression when going through a typical school day. This leads to students being punished externally or internally for things that never should have happened, and probably wouldn’t have if the student had been properly rested.

Many people brush this sleep deprivation off as teenagers being lazy or not going to sleep at a decent time. However, this is absolutely not true because teenagers are biologically drawn to going to sleep later in the evening and having a belated waking time. This means that it is not uncommon for a teen to not be able to fall asleep until 11 PM and to wake up fully rested at 8 AM. Besides naturally starting the day at 8 AM, students need time to get dressed, eat breakfast and get to school in the mornings. This puts students’ biological clocks at a stark contrast to early mornings.

All of these issues related to sleep deprivation have already started stirring changes in school schedules all across the nation and the world. School administrations should continue to make these changes because of all the benefits to delaying school by even 30 minutes to an hour. The delay would increase general day to day issues for students, as well as those who come in contact with said students.