Students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School will be able to get another half an hour of sleep in the mornings starting in fall 2020.
The LSRHS and Sudbury School Committees voted unanimously on June 11 to change their school day start times, with the high school day set to begin at 8:25 a.m. instead of the current 7:50 a.m. Sudbury elementary and middle schools will start at 7:55 a.m. and 8:30 a.m, respectively. In the coming academic year, administrators will work on an implementation pan, including schedule revisions and setting school day end times.
“The vote is not an end — it’s really a beginning,” said Carole Kasper, a Lincoln member of the L-S School Committee and its Start Time Subcommittee.
The move is based on recent research showing that the circadian rhythms of children’s bodies shift as they enter adolescence around age 12, resulting in naturally later times for falling asleep and waking up. Teens have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m., meaning that the early start time results in chronic sleep deprivation and other resulting problems.
“Based on the experience of districts across Massachusetts and the country, we expect our students will benefit from this change. Across both districts, we expect middle and high school students will have improved cognition, physical and emotional health, and academic performance, as well as fewer injuries, risky and impulsive behaviors, and absenteeism and tardiness,” the subcommittee said in a May 29 presentation.
Experts present their data and arguments in a four-minute video that was shown at a June 10 public forum (the segment begins at the 6:28 mark). This and other videos came about as a result of the National Conference on Adolescent Sleep, Health, and School Start Times held in Washington in April 2017.
If the current schedule structure remains as is, the end of the high school day would move from the current 2:40 p.m. to 3:14 p.m. The current three-year teacher contract signed in 2018 included flexibility to change the start time as long as the school day length remains at six hours and 49 minutes.
The school day ending time will affect after-school activities including sports. L-S athletic teams play in the Dual County League (DCL). League members Acton-Boxborough, Concord-Carlisle, and Weston have already moved to later start times in the school day, and Wayland will do so in the next year. Sixteen other Massachusetts school districts have done the same.
The movement toward later start times in Sudbury and L-S began in 2015 at a tri-district school committee meeting. A 2017 report by the LSHRS Sleep and School Time Subcommittee consisting of school committee members, teachers, administrators, and parents recommended changing morning bus schedules and creating a new subcommittee to investigate the operational issues involved.
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