It's a welcome shift from last year for him and thousands of students at the school, which pushed its start time back by more than two hours — from a 7:30 a.m. start time to 9:45 a.m. One goal for the change: to ease strains on students that were more visible than ever coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For some schools, the pandemic allowed experimentation to try new schedules. Upper Darby, for one, initially considered later start times in 2019. Ultimately, it found a way to do it this year by using distance learning as a component of the school day. During the pandemic, soaring numbers of high school students expressed persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, with girls and LGBTQ+ youth reporting the highest levels of poor mental health and suicide attempts. It doesn't help that research suggests middle and high school students aren't getting enough sleep.
Nationally, at least nine states are considering legislation related to school start times, up from four the previous year, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures. California in 2019 became the first and only state to dictate school start times. “If I’m tired I go to sleep, which was not something I was able to do last year. Last year I just had to get my homework done because there wasn’t an option of being able to do it later,” she said. “And so I liked that if I was tired, I could listen to my body and just let myself sleep.”
“It was sometimes a 60-minute concentrated instructional time. But then there was time to write. There was time to read. There was time to view a video,” he said.