High schools find later start time helps students' health and performance.

HIGH SCHOOL WILL START AT 8:15 AM this September in Duxbury, Mass, a Boston suburb, instead of at 7:30 AM, as it did last year. School officials hope the 45-minute delay will allow the 1000 students in grades 9 through 12 to sleep longer and arrive at school more alert and ready to learn. In the past decade, at least 80 US school districts have delayed their high school start times, and perhaps double that number are weighing such a change, according to informal reports to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF). While some parents worry students may stay up later, that has not happened in other school systems that have made such schedule changes. Studies show that when school starts later, students not only get more sleep but also contribute more to class discussions, doze in class less often, arrive tardy less often, miss fewer days, visit nurses and counselors less often, report less depression and irritability, and have fewer driving crashes. Kyla Wahlstrom, PhD, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (http://cehd.umn.edu /carei/), said she knows of no schools that have returned to an earlier start time after trying a later one. Wahlstrom, who led a multiyear study assessing the impact of delayed high school opening on 50 000 students in the Minneapolis Public Schools, is careful not to state that later start times directly improve student grades and test scores. “A change in start time is only one of many variables in a school setting that affects grades. We cannot study it in isolation,” Wahlstrom said. Still, she added, “trend lines show grades rise when schools open later. We never see trend lines suggesting grades go down.” Changing school start times requires adjusting schedules not only for classes and bus operation, but also for athletics and other extracurricular activities. It affects not only students, but also teachers, parents who need to transport children and arrange child care, after-school employers of high school students, and other community groups. Despite the challenges, once the Duxbury school committee concluded that a later start time would be in students’ best interest, “we had to find a way to make it happen,” said Susan Skeiber, superintendent of Duxbury public schools. Duxbury flipped its bus schedule to bring older students to school later and younger ones earlier. Research shows younger children are ready for school earlier than adolescents are, Skeiber said. School officials are exploring afterschool programs for families that now depend on older students to babysit younger ones in the afternoon. They plan to assess sleep and other behavior after the schedule change.