Fcps New Start Time Research Paper

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” is a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin. However, nowadays, it is hard to live by due to the fact that students are bombarded with unrealistic amounts of homework and assignments. In addition to this, many teenage students in Fairfax County Public Schools are forced to wake up early at very undesirable and unreasonable times; some students wake up as early as 5:00 AM in order to be ready for the 7:20 AM start time. Due to this, a large portion of teenage students are sleep deprived. These students are simply not getting the essential hours of sleep needed for daily function. It is completely necessary and beneficial to solve this sleep deprivation problem by pushing back the FCPS start time one hour later to 8:20 AM. This implementation would preserve the fact that students need an appropriate amount of sleep in order to live successful and productive lives and not enough sleep greatly impacts their health and academics.

There is a common misconception about teenagers’ sleep habits. It is a popular belief that teenagers biologically need around 8 hours of sleep per night. FCPS’s start time of 7:20 AM shows their firm belief in this statement because they recommend going to sleep at 10 PM and most students wake up at 6 AM to get ready. These approximated go-to-bed and wake-up times give the “model student” around 8 hours of sleep per night. However, realistically most students are unable to go to sleep as early as 10 PM due to the copious amount of assigned work for their classes. Thus, in addition

(Zegler, pg.2)

to the lack of sleep due to this presented issue of timing, new studies show strong evidence that the recommended hours of sleep for a teenager per night is approximately 9 to 9.5 hours(Hellmich). This and the fact that most students are unable to go to sleep at 10 PM should alone be enough evidence that it is completely necessary to change the FCPS start time to 8:20 AM....