The average high school day starts around 7:59 am, while thirty three percent of US public school start between 7:30-7:59 am (National Center for Education Statistics). These early start times force growing teens to wake up even as early as 4:30am to catch bus rides. With that being said, “From April to July 2017, the number of employed youth 16 to 24 years old increased by 1.9 million to 20.9 million, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This year, 54.8 percent of young people were employed in July, up by 1.6 percentage points from a year earlier” (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The youth workforce is steadily growing. This presents a rising issue: should school start times be pushed back in order to accommodate for students …show more content…
Many students have formed habits of staying up late or choosing to save their workload for the day until late at night. As stated clearly by Dr. Rapoport: "If you’re trying to meet a deadline, you’re willing to sacrifice sleep," (Sparacino). Even with a later start time, students would be willing to stay up late to get a grade. I did not conduct a formal interview; however, when this was presented to high schoolers one was quoted as saying “I have just made it my tradition to stay up all night Sunday into Monday morning, Not because of homework, I just like it”. There is no guarantee that a late start time would be fuller taken advantage of by high schoolers as …show more content…
Would all school times be pushed back, or would the order of the schools, as in highschool no longer starting first, be completely changed? If the latter was chosen, it would only produce an additional problem: many high schoolers have the responsibility of care young siblings. If the high schoolers were no longer being dismissed before the younger groups families would be forced to take on the expense of childcare or babysitting. Neither solution from those favoring the change in time would come without major