Resolved: High School Start Times In Virginia (Our Purposes: 7:00 AM) Should Be Moved 1 Hour Later

First, a 7 a. m. start time is detrimental to teenagers' health: their bodies are not designed to wake at such an early hour, and forcing their bodies to accept a very-early-to-rise schedule can result in a slew of other health issues. Second, several studies across the country have already shown that later school start times have both positive health and positive academic benefits on teenagers. My values, therefore, are health and academic achievement. Both are served better by later school start times than by the status quo of 7:00 a. m. First, the theory: The University of Minnesota's ResearchWorks explains that teenagers' brains produce melatonin, the chemical that makes us sleepy, from 11 p. m. to 8 a. m. In other words, they are hard-wired to be late to bed and late to rise. When this cycle is disrupted on a regular basis, teenagers don't get enough sleep on average and begin to accumulate sleep debt. A teenager with sleep debt is more likely to experience depression, less likely to be able to successfully relate to peers and parents, and more likely to abuse alcohol or other drugs (. http://cehd.umn.edu...). Scientific American adds that effects of sleep debt can also include, "a foggy brain, worsened vision, impaired driving, and trouble remembering. Long-term effects include obesity, insulin resistance, and heart disease" (. http://www.sciam.com...). Second, the studies: In 1997, on the basis of medical research including that described above, the Minneapolis Public School District changed the start time in its high schools from 7:15 a. m. to 8:40 a. m. Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom of the University of Minnesota followed the change with a four-year longitudinal study and found many positive effects. Attendance rates went up for students in grades 9, 10 and 11. Students were less likely to switch schools, which is most often the a result of low attendance, low grades, or misbehavior. Grades increased, although not statistically significantly. Students in the Minneapolis schools got an average of five hours more sleep per week than their peers in other districts (. http://cehd.umn.edu...). Echoing the positive effects of the Minneapolis experiment are two other experiments listed in The New York Times' 2008 article, "The Early Bird Gets the Bad Grade". In 2002 in Kentucky's Jessamine County, high school start times were moved back from 7:30 a. m. to 8:40 a. m. Attendance and standardized test scores went up immediately. When Kentucky's Fayette County moved its start time to 8:30 a. m. , fewer Fayette County teenagers were involved in car crashes, even as numbers rose in the state as a whole (. http://www.nytimes.com...). The American Academy of Sleep Medicine mentions a study in Massachusetts in which a later start time was followed by higher grades (. http://www.sleepeducation.com...). Many of the sources I have used to construct my argument also do their due diligence in reporting on the many perceived obstacles to later high school start times. I will leave it to my opponent to outline these for you, and I will respond to them in Round 2. For now, I will simply state that the obstacles I have read about fall into two categories: financial and logistical. The status quo of early start times, by contrast, damages teenagers' health, safety, and chance at academic success. Such damage should lead us to welcome the opportunity to wrestle with whatever financial and logistical obstacles we must overcome in order to implement a program that will go a long way toward improving the well-being of our young people. I look forward to responding my opponent's response.