From our news partners at The Seattle Times: Advocates who want later start times for middle and high schools to reflect teenage-sleep patterns hope that the Seattle school district could make the change by the fall of 2015.
Last year when she was a freshman at Seattle's Ingraham High School, Claire Noble-Randall had to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and catch two Metro buses to arrive in time for first-period chemistry.
Ingraham starts at 8 a.m., but she often didn't get to sleep until after midnight.
Noble-Randall chose Ingraham over a school closer to her Wallingford neighborhood because of Ingraham's International Baccalaureate program, but she paid for it in sleep deprivation. "It was really hard not to fall asleep in class," she said.
Her mom solved the problem this year when she discovered that other Wallingford parents had hired a private city tour bus to take their children to the school.
"Now she leaves the house at a much more sane (time) — say 7:10 in the morning … to catch the little tour bus at 7:23 a.m.," said her mother, Noelle Noble.
That may be one way to ease the sleep crunch,but more than 3,300 people have signed an online petition seeking a more comprehensive solution from the Seattle school district: that it start no high school or middle school before 8:30 a.m. Most of Seattle's high schools and middle schools start at 8 a.m. or earlier.
Later school-start times for teens is an idea that some parents around the Puget Sound area and the nation have been pushing for years, backed by mounting scientific evidence that teens tend to be biological night owls and delayed start times improve their health, mood, attendance and, in some cases, learning.
Yet making the change happen is often so logistically and politically complicated, affecting other legitimate interest groups, that only about 70 school districts around the country have figured out a way to do it.
Local advocates are pushing again, and this time they've got Seattle School Board President Sharon Peaslee, herself the mother of two high-school students, on their side.
