Town Hall Seattle hosted a panel discussion on school start times Monday night called “Start School Later, Let Teens Sleep.” Led by three specialists in child health and sleep dynamics, Wendy Sue Swanson, Pediatrician and author, Maida Lynn Chen, MD and director of the Sleep Disorders Program, and Catherine Darley, ND. The panelists presented to a small audience of parents and community members, and called for later school start times based on how detrimental sleep deprivation can be on developing minds like teens and adolescents.
Wendy Sue Swanson cited data from the National Sleep Foundation that eight out of 10 teens are not getting enough sleep. “Teen sleep has decreased over the past two decades.” Swanson said, making a connection between this decrease and the prevalence of media in our current age. “As pediatricians, we need to enforce a media curfew before bedtime.”
Maida Lynn Chen and Catherine Darley spoke about the effects this habitual sleep deprivation actually has on the development of young minds, saying how important it is to take this seriously in regards to education. Darley cited a quote from the CDC, “Insufficient sleep is a public epidemic.”
Detractors of later school start times have argued teens will simply stay up later.
Chen disagrees. “The reality is they don't,” she said. She and Darley pointed to a series of studies that have found significant benefits of later start times, including increased test scores, better judgment by teens, a decrease in teen promiscuity and, by extension, pregnancy, and fewer teen car accidents — by a factor of 16.5 percent.
Darley also pointed to data that showed later start times actually narrowed the achievement gap between Caucasian and African-American students, as represented by test scores.
After presentations the panel fielded questions from the audience, all the parents in the audience seemed on board with the later start time concept, with most of the questions revolving around logistics and discussions of how to convince school boards.
