Julia Roeder ’25

It’s 6:15 am, the dreaded automatic default Apple iPhone alarm fills your ears as you grab your phone to hit “snooze”. You were up until 11:30 finishing your Chemistry homework and didn’t make it to bed until well after midnight. As you are getting ready for school it is still dark out. And it will still be dark until you see a glimpse of the sun out the window while you are sitting in a fluorescent light classroom at 8 am getting handed a chemistry test, hoping that you were able to retain a fraction of the information you attempted to learn while doing your homework last night. As you go through your day you are constantly reminded of how tired you are, but you see there is no way to fix it. Weekends are your only hope to make an effort at trying to “catch up on sleep”.
This is the reality of the majority of high school students around the country. A constant cycle of exhaustion. A major contributor to this is the time in which school starts in the morning. According to a 2022 CDC (Center of Disease Control and Prevention), over 75% of schools nationwide start before 8:30 am. Here at both Grosse Pointe South and North, school starts at 8 am Tuesday- Friday. This nationwide standard for teens to be in a classroom by 8 am is an absurd expectation.
With the constant pressure of wanting to have the longest list of extracurricular activities to add to their college applications, students’ time for rest is already at a minimum. Sports, clubs, and volunteering are all things that eat up students’ time to relax. As a student-athlete myself, I know firsthand how draining it can be to balance your academics, sports, social, and family life while also trying to get an adequate amount of rest. It’s almost impossible. I know during the peak of a sports season it would be a rare occurrence if I was getting more than 7 hours of sleep. According to the CDC, teenagers’ natural circadian rhythms make it so teens naturally want to go to sleep later in the night and wake up later in the morning, compared to adults. High school-age kids should be getting anywhere between 8-10 hours of sleep and lack of sleep over a long period can result in increased chances of developing diabetes, depression, obesity, and in the worst cases heart attacks.
If the time the bell rang in the morning was anywhere between 9-9:30, that would be a tremendous help to the health and well-being of students. Even if it meant not getting released from school until 4-4:30, this could be an overall beneficial consequence of students getting more rest. Starting the school day later would not only help students be healthier but also feeling well-rested for a day of learning.