It’s Time to Do Away With Early School Start Times
The first bell echoes off the bricked hallways of Lindbergh High School in Renton, Washington, warning dazed and coffee-clutching students to pick up their pace. It’s December. It’s 7:15 a.m. It’s still dark outside. Yet, in five minutes, they are expected to be sitting in class, alert, and ready to learn.
Despite Seattle, Tacoma, and other neighboring school districts delaying their middle and high school start times in recent years, the Renton School District has yet to budge.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“It is inhumane,” says Alyssa Shewey, a teacher at the school. Yet a very early morning arrival is a common ask for teenagers in the U.S., with more than 40% of high schools starting before 8 a.m.
Our circadian rhythms, the internal drumbeats that direct the timely functioning of our sleep and countless other aspects of our physiology, drift later during adolescence. The change conspires with technology, late sports competitions, and social factors to keep older kids awake well into the night and then asleep well into the morning. To a teenager’s body, 7:15 a.m. is the equivalent of around 5:15 a.m. for an adult. And, of course, students must roll out of bed far earlier than that—and earlier still if they take one of the music classes offered during zero period. Many Lindbergh students say they count on multiple alarms to get to school on time.
The status quo of early morning bells in secondary schools—and somewhat later bells in elementary schools—is biologically backwards. But it hasn’t always been this way. For most of the 20th century, the typical school day didn’t start until 9 a.m. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, cost concerns led school districts across the U.S. to begin staggering start times to, in part, reduce the number of buses on the road. Many schools allocated the first shifts to middle and high schools, assuming older kids could better handle going to school in the dark, notes Terra Ziporyn Snider, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Start School Later.
“No one knew anything about circadian rhythms or adolescent sleep when we set those schedules,” says Ziporyn Snider. “We have a real problem now because we know we’re doing active harm.”
During the night-owl years of middle and high school, early wakeups inevitably mean insufficient and irregular sleep. Teens need between eight and ten hours of sleep, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Keeping consistent sleep and wake times may be just as crucial as sleep duration. Yet the average high school student in the U.S. sleeps around seven hours, according to research by the Nationwide Children’s Hospital, and throws off their regularity by trying to make up for lost sleep on the weekends. Based on conversations with students, the Lindbergh average may be closer to five or six hours of sleep on school nights. I witnessed manifestations of their sleep deprivation in a sampling of first period classes: audible yawns, glazed over eyes, and heads down on desks. Shewey, whose AP Psychology course covers sleep and circadian rhythms, admits that she usually doesn’t force them up: “If you need to sleep, you need to sleep.”
Poor sleep and circadian disruption carry numerous costs for teens. Studies point to lower grades and higher rates of car accidents, athletic injuries, risky behaviors, substance abuse, obesity, depression, and anxiety. Cycles of REM sleep primarily occur in the last third of the night. By cutting a night of sleep short by an hour or two or more, a teenager loses this vital time for the brain to solidify learning into memories and process emotions. REM sleep may play a critical role in strengthening critical thinking and problem-solving skills, too. “Kids may be sitting in schools, but their heads are still asleep on pillows at home,” says Mary Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and a child and renowned adolescent sleep expert.
The data shows that teen students sleep more when schools delay their first bells. School districts in Minnesota delayed start times in the 1990s and found the average student began sleeping about an hour longer on school nights. Students also started scoring higher on standardized tests. A similar 2012 study conducted after schools in Wake County, N.C., concluded that a morning bell one hour later led to a gain of at least one percentage point in reading test scores and two percentage points in math test scores for the average student, with greater gains for students at the lower end of the distribution. Another 2017 U.S. study linked delayed start times with increases in attendance and graduation rates, leading experts to suggest that later start times could help close the achievement gap and improve outcomes for socioeconomically disadvantaged students.
Disadvantaged students often sleep less to begin with and may lose disproportionately more sleep with earlier start times than their peers. For example, a student may depend more heavily on the bus to get to school—as opposed to having a parent who can drive them or receiving a car on their 16th birthday. And that bus may arrive really early.
Amari Williams, a junior at Lindbergh, catches a city bus at the end of her street at 6:33 a.m. each morning. If she misses it, she must wait 30 minutes for the next bus and will inevitably be late for school. A ride from a parent is not an option. One of her parents works long days; the other works the graveyard shift. “Both are either sleeping or busy,” says Williams. She is grateful that her first period teacher is understanding and doesn’t always mark her as tardy.
Arguments abound that teens should simply put away their smartphones and game controllers and go to bed earlier on school nights to combat early start times. While behavior changes can help nudge bedtime a bit earlier, a kid cannot change their night owl biology. Of course, I did speak with a few students who say they prefer early start times. A couple were among the rare early bird teens; a couple others need to make it home in time to care for younger siblings after school. There are always tradeoffs. Yet, there is still clear consensus among sleep and health organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, that secondary schools should delay start times to optimize teens’ sleep, mood, health, safety, and learning opportunities.
The state of California took their advice and, in 2022, became the first state in the nation to require public high schools to begin no earlier than 8:30 a.m. and public middle schools to start no earlier than 8:00 a.m. Florida recently followed suit, passing a similar bill that will go into effect in 2026. “This is one of the few nonpartisan issues,” says Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND Corporation, noting the states’ very different political environments. Troxel also coauthored an analysis in 2017 that concluded later school start times could prove both a public health and an economic boon.
Organizations such as Start School Later offer templates for schools to follow. And the movement is global. Some high schools in the Netherlands and Germany now give students options for when they come to school. Core subjects fill the middle day, between around 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. Students can, then, choose to take their electives in the morning or afternoon.
“We’ve come a long way. But still many, many school districts start excessively early,” says Troxel. In fact, some U.S. school districts are even going in the opposite direction: The Baltimore City Public School System, for example, recently pushed start times earlier to address a bus driver shortage. And there’s another threat to efforts to delay school start times: A proposed nationwide move to permanent daylight saving time—keeping our clocks dialed forward an hour—would undo gains made by delaying school start times an hour. If we’re being honest by the sun, that first Lindbergh High School bell would then ring at 6:15 a.m. year-round—the biological equivalent for teenagers of 4:15 a.m.
Read More: Daylight Saving Time Is Bad For Our Internal Clocks, Too
During that December morning visit to Lindbergh, I attended Shewey’s second period AP Psychology class. About 10 minutes in, students and staff were rattled by yet another blaring sound: the fire alarm. We evacuated into the frosty air and sunshine. “We’re awake now!” says Shewey, as she lines her class up at the 15-yard-line of the football field. The next 20 minutes of bright morning light exposure, before we are cleared to reenter, could be just enough to recalibrate our inner clocks and help us all fall asleep a bit earlier.
Kahiye Abdiqadir, a student in her class, would welcome any help. “To get enough sleep, I’d need to go to bed at 9 p.m. That’s impossible,” he tells me as we stand on the field. Abdiqadir says he at least tries to go to bed by 10:30 p.m. Still, he usually can’t fall asleep before midnight. And he can count on his alarm abruptly waking him at 5:30 a.m. “My sleep is terrible,” he says. “I drink a lot of caffeine.”
As if teens need another roadblock to falling asleep at night. A good portion of caffeine consumed during school hours may still be circulating in a teen’s body during the late evening hours.
Emerging evidence suggests that pushing back the first bell can also improve the sleep of teachers, administrators, and parents. Several members of the Lindbergh staff, including Shewey, told me that they’d prefer a later first bell themselves.
This then begs the question many have been asking, including Lindbergh student Anthony Kim: “If everyone is complaining about waking up early, then why do we keep doing it?”