Horry and Georgetown schools should make later start time permanent
Schools in Horry and Georgetown counties went to a two-hour delay late this past week when weather was forecast to drop into the single-digits.
That move was made for safety reasons, but a more permanent later start time would help young, developing brains, as well as the people trying to educate them.
Our kids are sleeping an average of an hour or so less than we did. That seemingly small difference could be at the heart of many educational problems.
A fairly simple, straightforward change – starting school a bit later – could offset many of the negative effects of that sleep deprivation.
“If I had a magic wand and an international formula to do something, it would be that,” Ashley Merryman, the best-selling co-author of two groundbreaking books on the child’s brain, “Top Dog” and “NurtureShock,” told me when I interviewed her for a series of stories about literacy.
Here’s why. A lack of sleep has been related to all sorts of maladies, including obesity, heart disease, depression, impaired executive function – the ability to control emotions, set goals and make connections – and memory loss.
It translates into poor academic performance and impulsive behavior.
“Tired children can’t remember what they just learned, for instance, because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory,” Merryman and Bronson wrote in “NurtureShock.” “A different mechanism causes children to be inattentive in class. Sleep loss debilitates the body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest – the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called ‘Executive Function.’ ... A tired brain ... gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous.”
Lack of sleep contributes heavily to the persistent achievement gap.
“If you compare their kindergarten sleep and third-grade tests, the lack of sleep in kindergarten predicts lower scores in third grade for black students and students in poverty,” Merryman told me.
What’s worse is that we have some of the earliest start times for students already facing myriad challenges. That’s why Galen Humphrey, who taught at the Horry County Education Center (the “alternative school” in Conway) for a year and a half, turned in his resignation.
“I left HCEC due to the policy of forcing troubled youths to get up so early and begin class at 6:30 a.m.,” he wrote to the school board. “Busing issues are not enough to convince me these children’s lives are not worth finding a fix for the harmful hours that we foist upon them. The hours create counterproductive conditions for teaching and learning. ... The plethora of scientific research and conclusions documenting the extremely deleterious effects ... of being constantly tired are enough for some, including myself, to suggest the policy is tantamount to torture. If not that, certainly a counterproductive effort to educate, especially youths already at risk and prone to poor-decision making. So many of our students at HCEC have numerous issues ... even before being assigned to the zombie-creating, fuse-shortening, unhealthy, early hours at HCEC.”
The effect of loss of sleep is less pronounced (but still real) among kids in rich and stable homes because their “parents had enough other things going on, extra enrichment, to make up for the lack of sleep,” Merryman said.
As Humphrey said, the research on sleep’s impact on cognitive ability is overwhelming.
Other findings from Merryman and Bronson:
A seemingly simple solution, of course, would be to encourage parents to make sure their kids have an earlier, stable bedtime, including high school students.
Studies have shown that most kids simply don’t have stable bedtimes. We do it with our 10-year-old and 13-year-old and they fight against their “unfair” bedtime every night. But not every kid lives in a stable household.
Research has also been clear that simply “educating” parents about such things don’t make much of a difference.
That’s why uniformly moving the school start time back makes the most sense.
Or as Merryman told me: “I can’t give a poor family $10,000 and a nicer house” but we can give them a fighting chance with more of an opportunity to sleep.
This story was originally published February 21, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Horry and Georgetown schools should make later start time permanent."