To the editor:
After all the homework is done, and dinner is over, kids go to bed. When WMS students go to bed on a weekday, they know they are going to wake up early. Why is that, you may ask? Well, it’s because school starts at 7:45am. We need to change this: WMS’ start time should be changed to 8:30am.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, schools should start no earlier than 8:30 to help middle school students ‘biological clocks’ reset. On top of that, they also say that middle school students should sleep for about eight to ten hours. But most WMS students do not get that much sleep; they cannot fall asleep as early as they need to wake up at 7:45.
If WMS continues to start the day so early, then middle school students will not be engaged during class. When they go to school, many students are still half-asleep. Changing this rule would mean that we could just show up and start learning without any roadblocks.
On top of that, middle school students are just depressed when we wake up in the morning. We can barely function and get out of the house, and it can be a pain for adults to keep us moving. Kind of like adults, except we don’t have coffee to energize us. Don’t parents want their kids to be happy instead of turning them into zombies so early on in our lives?
Making a change like this won’t necessarily be easy. Bus schedules, extracurricular activities, and teachers’ contracts will be difficult to alter, since all these factors rely on the times, and changing them may cause some irregularity for some time. But it is worth the hassle to reschedule, since the students’ engagement is on the line here.
We need to change WMS’s start time to match teenagers’ natural rhythms. To do that, we need the School Committee to begin this process by forming a Working Group that would get everyone’s perspectives: students, staff, parents and community. We know it will take time, but this change is worth the effort.
Aron Paulos
WMS 8th grader
