Early School Start Times Endanger Teen Drivers, Study Finds

Teens as a group are notoriously bad drivers, with the highest annual accident and traffic violation rate of any age group in the United States. Parents have good reason to fear for the worst every time their child gets behind the wheel: auto accidents are the leading cause of death for America’s teens.

A recent study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine is directing some of the blame on schools for creating dangerous driving conditions for teens. The study found that accident rates are 41 percent higher when high school classes begin before 7:30 a.m.

The study compared teen accident rates at two demographically similar neighboring communities in southeast Virginia: Chesapeake and Virginia Beach.

Accident data from 2008 provided by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles showed that there were 65.8 auto crashes for every 1,000 teen drivers in Virginia Beach compared to 46.6 for Chesapeake.

The only significant difference, according to the authors, was school start times. Classes started at 7:20 a.m. in Virginia Beach. Students in Chesapeake were able to sleep in an extra hour and twenty minutes because of the 8:40 a.m. start time.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine reports that the average teen needs more than nine hours of sleep per night. Falling asleep early can be difficult for teens because of natural night-owl tendencies and distractions such as smart phones and video games. As a result, teens often fail to get enough sleep and may drive to school with severe sleep deprivation.

Pushing forward start times for high school students will help them get more sleep, and as a result, make the roads safer. School districts across the United States have taken notice and have moved the opening high school bell to 8 a.m. or later.

Learn more about the sleep habits of teenagers.

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Parents Irate Over School Start Time Trade-off

A large urban school district’s move to accommodate children’s sleep needs seems to have backfired. Many parents are outraged that the Kansas City public schools decided to flip-flop elementary school and high school start times. Young children will be waiting at the bus stop before sunrise while teens get an extra hour of sleep.

District leaders had the students’ best interests in mind when they decided to make the switch. Extensive research links earlier high school start times to lower grades and more auto accidents. Many leading voices in the sleep field have advocated for schools to adjust for teens’ natural night-owl tendencies. Major school districts that pushed forward high school start times reported better grades, attendance and extracurricular participation.

The problems stem from costs. The Kansas City district would have to spend an estimated $15 million to buy new busses and hire drivers if primary and secondary schools started around the same time. District leaders say that is not an option.

The change resolves teen sleep issues but brings new daycare and safety issues for parents of younger children. Kids would finish school earlier in the afternoon, while many parents would still be at work. Parents are also weary over letting their kids stand outside in the dark, “at that time of the morning with weirdos” as one parent put it.

Although the research is not extensive, from a sleep health standpoint most elementary school children are able to adapt to earlier school start times. Younger children need more sleep than their teenage siblings, but are still wired to sleep easily in the early evening.

Teens need an estimated nine hours of sleep per night. That sleep need is difficult for most teens to achieve natural circadian rhythms combined with distractions such as cell phones and video games prevent them from feeling tired until late in the night. Some estimates show less than a quarter of teens get an optimal amount of sleep each night.

With bussing costs in mind there’s one option that’s rarely considered. What if high schools started mid-morning, after the traditional elementary school start times? The school day could run from about 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Teens would have plenty of time to sleep in every day and children would get to go to the bus stop while it’s light outside. The main downside is that athletics and extracurricular activities would run late into the evening. What do you think? Are there any other downsides with starting school in the mid-morning?

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Back to School Sleep Tips for Parents

It’s that time of year again when parents have to break the bad habits that keep kids up late during the summer months. The switch to an early morning wake-up call that comes with the start of school is the source frustration for parents. Getting kids to put down the Playstation controller and get to bed at a decent hour can be met with fits of refusal.

This bedtime battle is in the children’s best interest of course. Kids who use technology late into the night have trouble staying awake and alert in the classroom. As the Sleep Education Blog reported earlier this summer, children score higher in school when their parents enforce regular bedtimes.

Children need more sleep than adults for full daytime functioning and healthy long-term development. Individual sleep needs depend on the age. Younger children should get to bed much earlier than their adolescent siblings (see chart below).


If your child won’t sleep at bedtime it may be a sleep hygiene issue. Nearly a quarter of children have some kind of sleep complaint, whether its outright refusal to sleep or frequent trips to the bathroom.

The first step is to set a regular bedtime for your child, and enforcing it even on weekends. Staying up late on Saturdays may throw off their body clock and make bedtime difficult early in the school week.

A transition period may help children change their bedtime. Try putting them to sleep a half hour earlier every night until you have reached the desired bedtime. Then get them outside in the morning and expose them to sunlight. This can help them get used to being awake earlier by regulating their body clock.

Set an electronics black-out an hour before bedtime. Cell phones, computers and video games all have bright screens that can prevent children from feeling tired at bedtime. The stimulation from video games can also make winding down difficult. Try a reading hour instead and encourage a healthy hobby that can last a lifetime.

Chocolate, cola and caffeine in general should be off limits in the late afternoon and evening. There’s nothing more difficult than trying to get a kid on a so-called “sugar rush” to sleep.

Back to school can be a stressful time for families, but introducing these healthy habits can help kids adjust to early school start times, even if young people aren’t suited for early hours.

Students See Improvements With Later School Start Times

A slight change to high school start times may make a big impact on wakefulness and academic performance. A study published in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine is the latest to show why starting school near dawn may not be in the students’ best interest.

Improvements were across the board when a boarding school in Rhode Island pushed start times forward from 8 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Student felt more motivated when they were satisfied with sleep. Mood-related problems such as depression dropped, attendance improved and fewer students visited the nurse’s office with fatigue-related complaints.

By pushing forward start times by only 30 minutes the average night sleep increased by 45 minutes. Students went to sleep only about 18 minutes later. More than half of students slept for more than eight hours per night. More than three-quarters of normally sleep-deprived students reported getting more than seven hours of sleep per night.

The study involved 201 high-schooled aged participants. Each completed an online survey about sleep habits twice: before and after the school switched start times.
Classes may start as early as 7 a.m. in some U.S. schools. Student athletes may be required to report to school well before daybreak for practice.

The effect of various school start times is a hot topic in the sleep research community. Recent studies show early classes may be making students depressed. One well-publicized article links earlier start times to dangerous driving.

Adolescents and teenagers have different sleep architecture from adults and require more sleep. High school-aged students are more likely to be night owls and have difficulty sleeping in the evening. The AASM reports teenagers should get about 9 hours of sleep per night.

Teen auto accident rates higher when school starts earlier

Statistics from a new study show teenage drivers are more likely to get in an accident when classes start earlier. Crash rates are 41 percent higher for students who attend schools that begin around the crack of dawn.

The teen driver study presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2010 further fuels a movement to push forward school start times.

The data came from data from two adjacent communities with similar demographics provided by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. In Virginia Beach, school starts at 7:20 a.m. Classes start at 8:40 a.m. in neighboring Chesapeake.

Accidents reports show 65.4 out of every 1,000 teen drivers in Virginia Beach were in at least one crash. Less than 5 percent of Chesapeake teens were in automobile accidents.

The crashes happened more frequently in the afternoon than morning in both communities. The afternoon accident rate was about 3.5 percent in Virginia Beach (2 p.m. dismissal) and 2 percent in Chesapeake (4 p.m. dismissal).

Although the study does not prove cause and effect, lead author Robert Vorona believes earlier start times are restricting the time available for teens to sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends teens get at least 9 hours of sleep per night. Chronic sleep restriction increases the risk of an auto accident, and can lead to mood disorders, academic difficulties and behavioral issues.

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Delaying High School Start Times in England

One high school in England has delayed its start time by an hour to help students get more sleep, reports The Independent.

The school’s original start time was at 9 a.m. This would seem like a luxury to many U.S. teens who start school before 8 a.m.

Now classes begin at 10 a.m. The school day ends 30 minutes later in the afternoon.

“Here is something that schools can do to improve the health and mental health of their pupils,” headteacher Dr. Paul Kelley told The Independent.

The school doors remain open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This allows extra time for the supervision of students whose parents are at work.

Kelley was advised by Oxford sleep expert Russell Foster, PhD. Foster emphasized that teens have a biological need for more sleep than adults. And they are wired to perform better in the afternoon hours than in the early morning.

"It is time we stopped ignoring the sleep patterns of young adults," Foster told The Independent. “It is cruel to impose a cultural pattern on teenagers that makes them underachieve. Most school regimes force teenagers to function at a time of day that is sub-optimal.”

Earlier this year the Sleep Education Blog reported that teens in Kansas and Minnesota have benefited from starting school later. A proposal to delay high school start times in one Virginia county stirred a strong debate before being rejected.

Learn more about teens and sleep loss and your teen’s bed time on SleepEducation.com.

Sleep and High School Start Times: Lessons from Fairfax County

An editorial in today’s Washington Post examines the debate over school start times. It shows just how complex it can be to make changes to daily school schedules.

A proposal in Fairfax County, Va., would change the start time of most high schools in the county from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. It appears that there is strong support for a change. But there are also many obstacles.

Money is one concern. In Fairfax County, 169,000 students must be transported to and from school each day. This is both complicated and costly.

The Post reports that Fairfax school officials once estimated that a schedule change could cost up to $40 million. But they found ways to make bus routes more efficient. This led to the current “no-cost” proposal.

Teens and parents may have concerns about starting and ending school later. Will some teens still have time to work on school nights? How will after-school activities be affected? Will the new schedule allow enough time for school teams to practice and play games?

In Fairfax County the group Worried About Keeping Extra-curriculars (WAKE) formed around this issue. Another group called Save Our Sport formed to represent the needs of high-school swim teams and dive teams.

Another huge hurdle for many parents is the issue of day care. Changing the schedule may cause younger children to start and end school earlier. Working parents may have to make new arrangements for the supervision of these children after school.

There also is a debate over the merits of the problem. Scientists report that a biological change causes teens to feel sleepy later at night. Early school start times may prevent them from getting the sleep they need.

Others may argue that teens just need more discipline. They could get more sleep if they would get off the Internet and put down their cell phones earlier at night.

What do you think? Is it worth the effort to change school schedules so teens can get more sleep? Or does making a change cause more problems than it solves?

Update 3/20/09: The Washington Post reports today that the Fairfax County School Board rejected the proposal to delay high school start times by a vote of 10 to 2. According to the article, the board decided that changing the school start times would create too much stress for students and parents.

Should Teens Start School Later?

The Washington Post reports that Fairfax County in Virginia is the latest school district to join the debate over school start times. A proposal would change the start time of most high schools in the county from 7:20 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

The goal is to help sleep-deprived teens get more sleep. Research shows that teen sleep loss is related in part to a biological change that occurs during the teen years.

A shift in the body clock’s timing makes it hard for teens to fall asleep before 11 p.m. As a result teens fail to get enough sleep when they have to get up early for school.

But will teens really get more sleep if school starts later in the morning? Or will they just stay up even later at night?

A new study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine examined this question. It focused on a Kansas county that changed the high school start time from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. Results show that the change had a positive effect.

A higher percentage of students got eight or nine hours of sleep per night. There was a decrease in “catch-up sleep” on weekends. Daytime sleepiness also decreased.

The study also suggests that school start times may be linked to drowsy driving. Crash rates for teen drivers in the county dropped by 16.5 percent in the two years after the change. In the rest of the state teen crash rates increased 7.8 percent.

Changing school start times can be a complex decision. It requires altering bus schedules. It has an impact on after-school sports, activities and jobs. It also affects after-school care for younger children.

But the change may be worth the effort. A study looked at how the change affected more than 12,000 high school students in the Minneapolis Public School District. It found that student attendance and enrollment improved. Students also got an average of five more hours of sleep per week.

So what do you think? Should teens get a later start in the morning?