Schools
Should We Be Worried about Changing the School Start Times?
In an effort save as much as $600,000, the Plainfield School District 202 board is considering a three-tier start schedule.
Moms Talk is a new Plainfield Patch feature that is part of our initiative to reach out to moms and families. We invite you and your circle of friends to help build a community of support for mothers and their families here in town. Each week, we ask out -- just average moms in Plainfield -- to give us a topic for discussion.
Michelle Waldorf’s eighth-grade daughter was looking forward to sleeping a little bit longer next year when she begins attending Plainfield East High School.
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Turns out she won't be getting that extra shut-eye after all. Deficit-reducing measures recently proposed by Plainfield School District 202 officials would change school start times, meaning she’ll actually be getting up an hour earlier than she is now to get to school on time. If she wants to go out for sports, she’ll be at school longer because teams practice later.
The proposed "triple tier" busing system could save nearly $600,000, district officials say. It would move the high school morning bell to 7:05 a.m., with classes dismissing at 2:16 p.m. Middle school hours would be 8 a.m. to 3:01 p.m. and elementary school hours would be 9:10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.
Find out what's happening in Plainfieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Waldorf says the scenario has her daughter "bummed," and maybe rightly so. Studies show that teens have an internal sleep clock that resets at puberty, around the ages of 11 or 12. The shift makes it nearly impossible for teenagers to get sleepy until long after 10 p.m. And sleep experts know that getting up with less than 9.25 hours of sleep can put teenagers at a disadvantage.
Sleep deprivation for high-schoolers can cause students to have trouble paying attention in class, difficulty in using good judgment and problems solving, bring on moodiness and irritability, and create memory problems, immune system deficiencies and delayed reaction times, research shows. Tired teens are involved in more than 50,000 crashes each year.
Revising school hours will impact younger kids, too. Elementary school students might not get home until 4:30 p.m.; in the winter, that means after the sun has set.
So, parents out there, we want to know: Do you think the triple-tier bus system is a good idea or bad one?
