Starting School at an Early Time Negatively Affects Students

The school policy has been that school begins at 7:23 a.m., which is an early time for all high school students. Back in 2014, the start time used to be at 7:25 until they pushed the start time back two minutes to 7:23. Studies show that 78% of students struggled with getting up early for school and on time. There were already so many arguments to push back the time for going to school just because of how much it is affecting students. For example, the student’s mental health has been affected, it’s very hard for students to start working so early, and a positive side effect to that would be that attendance would increase. According to the Central Connecticut State University study, attendance could increase by 4% which is still a lot. 

Waking up early for school has been negatively affecting the students mental health which causes them to have an unhealthy amount of anxiety. Research shows that waking up before 8:30am to go to school has been really hard for students. The PMC PubMed Central study shows that the percentage of students with anxiety and overall sadness is 75% which is really horrible to hear. Students who take the bus to school usually have to wake up even earlier which is even harder for all of them to do. This adds so much stress into everyone’s life about making sure to get to school on time and prepared.

A lot of these students feel so overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to do very early in the morning which affects their grade. Also the American Psychological Association study shows that around 70% of students are usually tired and don’t get enough sleep for school which results in students being unfocused in the morning. Being super tired and doing work right away will not benefit them because the overall grade they’ll get won’t be the best since they did that work while being tired. That would increase student anxiety and overall their whole mental health due to how much stress they’ll gain from waking up very early. 

It’s very difficult for students to wake up early and start doing work right away. Imagine they have to take a test right in the beginning of school. It’s very tough for them to focus, especially because they just woke up. In my own experience, I have geometry first and taking a test at around 7:30am is really hard since it’s very early in the morning and at that time we should still be getting our sleep. There are many people out there experiencing the same situation, so I am speaking on behalf of many of the students out here that feel the same way I do. 

Changing this policy will not only help the students but it would also benefit the school as well. There has been a big problem with attendance recently with getting in school on time. That results in detention after school which many students now experience. People are way too tired to wake up and that results in tardiness. Making school start at a later time would increase the students’ attendance rate which would be great for the school.