Woburn Will Revisit Later School Start Times

WOBURN, MA -- The school commitee and Woburn Superintendent Matthew Crowley signaled they will reopen discussions on pushing back the start of the school day for high school students. 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.

"I do think it's an issue we need to look at," Crowley said at the school committee meeting earlier this month. Last spring Crowley advised the board to hold off on a decision until they could get feedback from staff. In March, the Woburn School Committee formed a task force made up of community members to look at the issue.

The evaluation 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 the 2017-18 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.

Subscribe to Woburn Patch for more local news and real-time alerts.

Patch file photo.

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