Sleep Deprivation In High Schools

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Recommended: Lack of sleep and its negative effect on academic performance

Kelly always has a hard time during her first period; it is her favorite subject but she just cannot wake up in the mornings. Kelly is the average high school student. She’s involved with extra curricular activities, after school clubs, and many other things. She is not the only student with this problem. This problem of sleep deprivation occurs with almost 90% of high school students. Numerous studies have shown that teenagers are not getting the required amount of sleep to function throughout the day. Teenagers need at least eight and a half to nine and a half hours of sleep a night. Teenagers are becoming more and more sleep-deprived because the average teen is not getting tired until at least 11:00 p.m. on a nightly basis and then having …show more content…

This later start time not only will lower the number of student accidents but also it would decrease the cases of student depression, standardized test scores will increase, and help those teens that tend to be very grouchy and irritable when they don’t get enough sleep be happier, so implementing later start times will also help the numerous behavior problems the high school has. School districts should push back start times because sleep deprivation leads to academic failure. Teens constantly complain about their grades being bad which is an affect of sleep deprivation. The article "School Should Start Later So Teens Can Sleep, Urge Doctors" by Kelly Smith states “Only 34 percent of students are getting the recommended eight hours of sleep when school starts at 7:30 a.m. compared with 66 percent of students getting eight hours of sleep at schools that start as late as 8:55 a.m.”. One may think that once a person becomes wide-awake they are now “fully functional”; this statement is completely false. In order for a human being to become …show more content…

From parent work schedules, extra curricular activities, and student jobs. Parents are worried about the elementary school students that do not get out of school until 3:30 p.m., they are worried about how to get their child from school. There are many solutions to this minor issue, Some schools have after supervised after school programs where the younger students that can’t stay home alone can wait for their parents or older siblings to come pick them up (Park). The extracurricular activities that take place after school would not be affected as much as one may think. Many after school practices do not start until at least 5:00 p.m., if the practices start immediately after school the team and/or group would be able to get the same amount of practice as they do during a practice that starts at five. Later start times would actually help improve the sports teams because the students would be getting more sleep, which means they would get more energy, helping the team in the long run. Since high school students are old enough to become employed and work, many places of employment work around the schooling schedule. The later start times of high school would help make the student a more efficient employees, they would not be as tired as they may be during their work

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