Are high school start and end times beneficial to kids? School times impact teenage health and starting as early as 7:00am, is too early. Kids are supposed to do extracurricular activities, have a job, do a sport, and then go home, and somehow finish all the homework that they had from seven classes, all in time to be able to get a good night’s sleep. 

“By the time I got home from school, I always ate a snack, and had to leave for basketball right away. Then by the time I got home from basketball, it was after dinner time, so I had to eat. I also always take showers at night so by the time I actually start my homework, it’s not until almost 9:00. And I usually have a few hours of homework every night.” Maueen Healy, a basketball player at Quakertown replied. “I feel like I’m always just on the move and never get a second to breathe or take a break from everything for a few minutes.”

Waking up early in the morning from only sleeping 3 or 4 hours before is unhealthy and causes kids to be extremely tired during their class. Sometimes in classes the teacher may just talk for 50 minutes straight and not be interacting which causes kids to fall asleep during class. Although we might not feel like it, our bodies can tell the difference between 9 hours of sleep and 3 hours of sleep and we will be able to tell the next day.

Classes should stay shorter as well, which calls for shorter school days. For example, classes were all 50 minutes long, but by the time the 40 minute mark hits, kids usually start unraveling and are already packed up 5-10 minutes early. When that all adds up across 7 classes, that’s around 50 minutes of wasted time throughout the day of not doing anything educational. Starting school around 7:10 and ending around 12:30 has so many benefits. 

Once you get home around 12:30, you still have half your day left, so you don’t need to rush to do anything. Maureen Healy answered about her thoughts of this year’s school times so far. “I really think that school times should always be like how they are now with this pandemic. Although it will take getting used to, I think leaving around lunch time provides for so much more activity after getting home from school.”

With keeping those class times, they’re shorter so students will be more motivated to learn and get things done during each class period. Instead of having so much extra time to talk and pack up. Students also feel extremely tired after having school, work, and sports, and just by making school end earlier, it would encourage them to get school work done and faster to be able to submit it by the deadline.

For example, many students from every school stay up late every night trying to cram all their missing assignments at the last minute at 11:59pm. But kids should be sleeping for a couple hours by then. By the time they do their final submissions, and have to wake up for school the next day, they have only slept a few hours, but they need more.

With the loss of sleep, teenagers can experience weight gain, anxiety, depression, and other things like eating disorders and mood swings. Teenagers brains and bodies are still growing and waking up that early, they need to go to sleep earlier. More time in their day after school, provides extra time to complete all their daily tasks and get everyone to sleep by a decent time, and get around nine hours of sleep.