School Should Start One Hour Later

One of the worst parts of the day is waking up early. Hearing your alarm ring before sunrise and having to get out of bed, do your morning routine, and then endure an entire day of class is grueling at the least. For many students, waking up early can also offset their entire day through fatigue, especially if they don’t get enough hours of sleep. But there’s a super easy solution to this: make school start one hour later, which the American Psychological Association correlates with more sleep, better academic performance, and a myriad of mental and physical health benefits. In this case, the later bird gets the worm.

            One thing a later start provides is getting more sleep – already, many students at Bellevue suffer from a bad sleep schedule. Studying or scrolling can make staying up past midnight easy for some students. When school starts one hour later, it gives many students more leeway to sleep and to recover their body for the next day.

            “I wake up at 6:30 a.m. every day because I live pretty far from Bellevue. Sometimes when I stay up too late, I feel like I’m going to die in the morning from fatigue,” said sophomore Sreeansh Kokkonda.

This problem can be reflected in a lot of students – and it can get bad. Less sleep, especially for teens, can directly lead to things like poor grades, anxiety, and depression, as Stanford Medicine says. This problem also affects students like Kokkonda the most. Since they live more than 20 minutes from Bellevue, it means waking up even earlier than normal.  

            Other students feel that they aren’t prepared enough for the day in the early morning. Many students at Bellevue have hard classes in the morning that can be very overwhelming to deal with after just waking up.

            “I have Anatomy in the morning and always feel foggy for some reason. School starting one hour later would be super helpful for me to study,” said sophomore Logan Wong.

            School starting one hour late also helps the people that like waking up early, who get more time in the morning to do what they want. Sure, school ending one hour later can cause problems with after-school activities but, in my opinion, it’s worth it to ensure we have students that are rested and prepared for the long day they have ahead of them.