Greenwood Village – The adolescent brain, researchers agree, needs to sleep in, but an effort by Cherry Creek officials to accommodate drowsy middle schoolers by starting classes later in the morning will be rolled back next school year to accommodate parents’ scheduling preferences.
School district officials call it a compromise. As of fall 2007, middle schools will start at 8:25 a.m., which is 10 minutes earlier for four of the nine middle schools.
All middle schools will dismiss students at 3:35 p.m., which is five to 20 minutes earlier for most schools. The changes, which sound slight, will subtract 29 hours from instruction time next year.
And the uniform starting time means the district needs more buses. Scheduling changes in the past two years and growth will cost the district $1 million in increased transportation costs, district spokeswoman Tustin Amole said.
“We’re trying to be responsive to parents who wanted their children released earlier,” Amole said. “This is the compromise.”
In 2006 the school board decided that middle schools would begin 20 to 65 minutes later this school year. In addition to allowing for more sleep, the schedule addressed safety concerns about children walking to school in darkness because of the earlier change to daylight saving time, which added four weeks of later sunrises.
The board also set later dismissal times, intending to cut down on “home alone” time for kids not tied up with sports or other afternoon activities.
But most parents and teachers disliked the later schedule, said Carol Tanner, the mother of Falcon Creek seventh-grader Michael.
“I didn’t see any advantage at all to starting later,” she said. “Getting out later made the whole evening seem so much more scheduled and rushed. It interfered with sports. Homework time was late. My kid seemed more tired.”
Other parents said they disliked having their elementary schoolchildren home alone before older siblings arrived to join them. Teachers, such as Campus Middle School’s Brenton Burnett, had lobbied against the change because it cut down on afternoon planning time.
Amole said the district, while bowing some to parental and staff pressure, still stands behind the reasons it made the change in the first place. Mountains of research conclude that adolescents need about nine hours or more of sleep a night. Even with that, they can be so sleepy during the day that their academic performance suffers and injuries are more common.
Adolescents naturally fall asleep and wake later because, in late puberty, the body secretes melatonin, the hormone related to sleepiness, at a different time. Stanford University researchers noted that sleep deprivation impairs memory, inhibits creativity and aggravates mood swings.
“I think the school district should be applauded for trying the later schedule,” said Lisa Shimel, mother of Falcon Creek seventh-grader Adam Davis. “It was undertaken for reasons about kids – what is best for the kids. The compromise plan to me seems more about parents’ convenience.”
The National Sleep Foundation recommends that schools be “sleep friendly” by setting later schedules.
“There is growing awareness about this, but I can’t say it has been widely implemented nationally,” said foundation spokeswoman Lisa Tumminello.
For Benita Creacy, the mother of 13-year-old Daniel and 11-year-old Aleene, next year’s start time is better than last year’s, when class began at 7:30 a.m. at West and five other middle schools.
“It makes our lives easier,” she said. “The kids are less hard to deal with.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com.
Teens speak up on sleep, and lack of it
A 2006 National Sleep Foundation survey on sleep patterns of U.S. adolescents, ages 11-17, found that only 20 percent get the recommended nine hours of sleep on school nights. The survey also found:
Adolescents who get insufficient sleep are more likely to get lower grades.
Among adolescents who report being unhappy, tense and nervous, 73 percent feel they don’t get enough sleep at night and 59 percent are excessively sleepy during the day.
More than one-quarter of adolescents say they’re too tired to exercise.
At least once a week, more than one-quarter of high school students fall asleep in school, 22 percent fall asleep while doing homework and 14 percent arrive late or miss school because they oversleep.
