Woburn School Committee Holds Off On Later Start Time Decision

WOBURN, MA -- The school committee will wait to hear feedback from principals and staff before deciding whether or not to push back the high school start time by as much as an hour. As a result, later start times would not start until at least the 2019-20 school year. The committee directed Superintendent Matthew Crowley to begin discussing the proposal with staff.

Students currently start school at 7:30 am, but there has been a push in recent years to push back the start of the school day for teenagers. Two years ago the 11 members of the Middlesex League agreed to consider the issue and make changes to sport schedules to accommodate schools that decided to start school later. Woburn and Reading are the only two districts that have yet to change their school day schedules.

In March, the Woburn School Committee formed a task force made up of community members to look at the issue. The committee's formation comes as a growing body of research shows that teenagers get only 6 to 6.5 hours of sleep per night when experts recommend eight to 10 hours per night for adolescents. Proposals like the one Woburn is considering come as researchers increasingly find that shifts in sleep patterns during adolescence make it harder for teens to fall asleep as early as adults and younger children.

Later school start times for high school and middle school students have been shown to increase academic performance. The National Sleep Foundation also notes a link between early high school start times and higher rates of emotional and behavioral problems such as irritability, depression, substance abuse issues, poor impulse control and violence.

School districts in 19 states implemented later start times for this school year, according to USA Today. Meanwhile, California is considering a bill that would make it illegal for schools to start before 8:30 a.m. Still, like Woburn High School, about one out of every 10 schools in the U.S. has a start time before 7:30 a.m.

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Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).