Should school start later? Yes, for several reasons.
- It would improve the students tardiness as well as improve attendance at school. Starting later but ending at the same time would only make the school year better. it would make kids like school more knowing the day isn’t that long.
- A lot of teens struggle with mental health and having good sleeping habits helps with mental health as much as it could. Only being able to sleep two days out of seven isn’t the best for mental health. we all thought school is all about mental health.
- Some people say transportation would be the hardest problem to fix/adjust so I talked to Mr. Hoffert the head of transportation about this topic.
I asked “Why can’t we sleep in when a lot of FCPS students would want it?”
He said “With the number of schools and students needing bussing, there just aren’t enough buses or drivers available to have every school start at the same time. We have to do staggered start times so that bus drivers can triple up on their routes. Right now, drivers do a middle school run first, then drop off and head out to do their high school run. After they drop off the high school kids, they go do an elementary school run, then some of them come back to the middle school for a late run. If all of the schools started at the same time, we wouldn’t have enough buses to get everyone there. That means someone has to have the early start time, and back in 2012 or so, the school board at the time decided that it was important for high school students to get the extra sleep, and that middle school students (for the two years they are there) could handle the earlier start time.” But, many kids can probably agree that they want school to start later for all of these reasons and then some.
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https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/benefits-of-later-school-start-times
