October 21, 2016

Dear Future President,

The ringing of a song or even an ear piercing beeping noise coming from across their bedroom makes most teens cringe at the thought of it. Going to sleep can be even harder then waking up at 6:00 in the morning. And then having to go to school and actually function properly on top of the fact that you're already tired can just add to all of the stress for teenagers. Just the word alarm can make most teenagers groan and roll their eyes because of all the things they know that follow, getting dressed, eating breakfast, brushing teeth and going to school so early in the morning can be a huge struggle. Especially when their only half awake.

Though school start times have a reason, grades are dropping, stress levels are rising and teenagers are losing their minds over it. Therefore school start times need to be later. Whether it’s by one hour or even just 30 minutes of school being latened, can take away a lot of the stress teenagers have.

Personally, I have a huge issue waking up but the process of actually, physically getting up and out of bed. As do most of America’s teenagers. But as teens, we tend to postpone almost everything, our homework, our chores, even feeding a household pet. We do this because we are tired, and tired people in general don’t function as well as they should. This is why oneself needs to either find a way to get more sleep or just fight for school time to start later.

As the days of school seem to just blur together as the days go on, teenagers are getting more stressed and getting less class time to work on the task at hand. Therefore getting lower grades. In an article “ Day in the Life”, they found out that once adolescence reach high school, they ideally need 9-10 hours of sleep a night for healthy development and to be able to function properly. On average high school students only get 6-8 hours of sleep on a school night as to where they get almost 11 hours of sleep on the weekends. This means that teenagers are getting almost 2 hours less of sleep a night which makes them not function properly in the morning, in the afternoon, or even in the evening. This matters because sleeping time for teenagers is very, very valuable because of the fact that they always seem to be tired. And when teens don’t sleep they tend to lose concentration and begin not being able to focus in class and losing valuable instruction time. This is why school needs to start later so that teens are getting the educational time that they need.

Now if there are all of these reasons why teenagers are not doing well in school, why are they not getting enough sleep. Well according to Lynn O’Shaughnessy, a writer for CBS News station who wrote ‘’Why Your Teen Needs a “B’’ Average’’, says and I quote, “The magic GPA seems to be 3.0. Teenagers who earn at least a 3.0 GPA are far more likely to graduate from college than their high school classmates who eke out a 2.9 GPA or lower.” This means that if teenagers aren’t doing well in school but still want to go to college, they won’t be able to because of their low grades caused by not paying attention in class because they hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before. This is important because if our nation doesn’t have educated people, we are going to make more and more uneducated actions.

Some solutions we can create to solve this problem is, obviously making school start times later by an hour or so, or another solution is to move sport practice times that are after school, which is one of the reasons why schools do start so early. Another reason is that other after school activities (ex.soccer, book club etc.) happen and if school times start later, not only will the kids have to adjust but so will the parents.

All of this time and work being used will help teens wake up in the morning and be excited to go to school knowing that they don’t have to hear that annoying alarm clock every morning, will improve America’s future generation in the long run.

Sincerely,

Kennedy Hadlock