Getting enough sleep, of course, means better performance at school for most students. That just makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense, though, is trying to legislate a mandated school start time that doesn’t take into account the different needs of the variety of school districts and the children they serve.
Legislation proposed at the Minnesota Legislature attempts to boost performance and health of teens by mandating schools start later. The bill would prevent middle and high schools from starting earlier than 8:30 a.m. and forbid elementary student bus pickups before 7 a.m.
School start times all over the state are intertwined with how long it takes to bus kids to and from a school, what extracurriculars are scheduled before and after school, the varying competitions that require students leave school early (so they’d miss even more class time if school started later) and other factors. Later class times could throw a wrinkle in all of that for many districts.
The variables are wide and often depend on a school’s location and how far students live from it. The legislation would make no sense to the northern Minnesota district that runs from Duluth to Canada. Those children have to be picked up early in the morning or their school day would run well into the evening by the time they got home. Tailoring the start day for teens so they can sleep in would ignore the needs of those younger children to be home sooner at night.
Of course, another factor is that working parents often have to drop children off on their way to work and waiting later in the morning might not fit work schedules.
Clearly, it should be up to school districts to determine what works best for the majority of their student population. If school leaders determine their teenage students would perform better by sleeping in and starting class after 8:30 a.m., then that’s a local decision they can make based on the needs of most their students.
A parent who supports the proposal to start after 8:30 a.m. actually made a case against the legislation. She said her daughter was doing so much better after her school moved its start time back — but it was moved to 8:20 a.m., a time that wouldn’t be allowable under the proposed law.
Mankato Free Press, April 29
