OPINION

When high schools start too early, students pay a price

Dave Caudill
Opinion contributor
The national shortage of school bus drivers is hitting some Northern Kentucky districts hard.

Imagine that our drinking water contained a toxic substance that caused a lot of area teenagers to:

  • Perform well below their potential in school.
  • Exhibit more sadness, stress, depression and suicidal tendencies.
  • Be involved in more traffic accidents.
  • Engage in risky behaviors with drugs, sexual activity or weapons.
  • Suffer higher rates of athletic injuries.
  • Be at greater risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers and other serious health problems.

If the drinking water could be blamed for every one of those things, a lot of people would be demanding, screaming perhaps, for something to be done yesterday.

A truckload of medical research going back to the 1990s has demonstrated that if teenagers start school much earlier than 8:30 a.m., they are more susceptible to all of those conditions. But if schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later, the numbers go down significantly for each of them.

Why? Because more sleep helps alleviate all those problems and more. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that adolescents get about nine hours each night for optimal health.

Eight of Cincinnati’s 14 public high schools start their days before 8:30 a.m. Three of them — Aiken, Clark Montessori and Walnut Hills — begin at 7:30 a.m. Dater starts at 7:40a.m. Western Hills and Oyler start at 7:45 a.m. Withrow and the Virtual High School start at 8 a.m. Three others start at 8:30 a.m. or within minutes of it (Hughes, SCPA, Taft). The latest three start times are Shroder (8:45 a.m.), Woodward (9 a.m.) and Riverview East (9:15 a.m.).

A majority of the city’s public high school students get to their schools by riding Metro buses. CPS contracts with Metro to provide this transportation. If schools start at 7:30 a.m., a lot of those students are catching buses 6-6:45 a.m.

Some parents argue that later start times will simply mean their kids will go to bed later, so they won’t really get more sleep. But a 2014 study by a team from the University of Minnesota, based on sleep diaries of thousands of students across the country, deflates that argument. Later school start times mean more hours of sleep, the study showed.

The Cincinnati school board is well aware of the medical research on early start times’ effect on sleep and health, thanks in part to a determined group of local parents, medical professionals and educators who are pushing to get all the Cincinnati public high schools to start at 8:30 a.m. or later.

The school board clearly is listening. The issue has been on the agenda at several recent board meetings, discussed at meetings between CPS and city officials and was the subject of a well-attended Community Conversation on March 15.

The start-times issue is not Cincinnati’s alone. A national organization called, plainly enough, Start School Later (online at StartSchool-Later.net) has been working to make school districts, parents and anyone who should be listening aware of the benefits of 8:30 a.m. or later start times.

In Cincinnati, bus transportation is a serious roadblock. The problem is complex, but at its heart is that Metro does not have enough buses to transport all the city’s public high school students to and from school if they are riding at the same or very similar times.

Metro says the start times must be staggered within a window of about an hour and a half, which they now are. Representatives from the local later start time initiative, Metro, the local Better Bus Coalition and the city are planning a “transit hackathon” to develop a creative way to allow more high school students to start later. You can learn more about the local effort by emailing CPSschoolstart@gmail.com.

Surely, there is a good solution. Until one is found, we are throwing the better health and well-being of thousands of the city’s students under the bus.

Dave Caudill is a freelance writer, a former Enquirer staffer and the father of a teenager who attends Walnut Hills High School.

Dave Caudill