Why School Should Start Later Essay

Words: 529
Pages: 3

Imagine for a moment that you are in the life of a Junior in high school. You just woke up from a late night to get ready to go to school. It’s 6 o’clock and you start to drive to school. As you are, you don’t notice the stop sign on that intersection, until you feel the impact. You hit a pedestrian, and get severe damage to your car. This shows that we should start later.
I personally have to get up early every weekday morning. After having a late night working on homework and other projects, I only get 6-7 hours of sleep, making it hard to stay attentive. I know how hard it is to get up and stay up, and to fit in all those requirements, breakfast, incomplete homework, packing, etc. Students are not getting the time they need to do the things they want, or need to do.
When schools started later in Lexington, KY, they found that their teen car crashes dropped 16.5%, while elsewhere in Kentucky, the rate increased by 7.8%. If teen safety is important to school administrators, they would have already changed their school’s start times.
While it also lessens the chance of car accidents, it has been shown that starting school later can also reduce alcohol intake, suicide, and depression. With a solution for these problems as easy as just starting later, why doesn’t everyone do it?
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Busses are expensive, and schools usually use the same busses for the Elementary, Middle and High Schools, so changing one time means changing the others. However, starting schools later will mean more time in the mornings. This will allow students to get their homework done and not have to rush to finish it during homeroom. Also, a lot of high school and junior high/middle school students don’t get enough breakfast. Many of them don’t get the proper nourishment that teens need. While it might not seem an issue, breakfast has been speculated by many as the most important meal of the