Schools should start no earlier than 8:00 AM

I would first like to point out that my opponent agrees in the beginning of the round that academically, I have proven that starting school later is better. In my opponents third argument, he brings up that some students did better in their morning classes. I would like to point out, that he says the article does also show that students do better in the afternoon and that the article states that the morning classes begin at 8:00 AM, so either way, this has no bearing on the debate.2. ) I would also like to bring up that my opponent did not explain how spending time with family impacts grades and education, nor does the article provided, and he also does not explain how this links into the debate. This could be a whole other debate, however we are not debating the effect of family time on grades, we are debating the effects of school start times. This debate is not even constrained to how start time effects grades, so this argument has no tie to the resolution.3. )I am going to use several sub points to rebut my opponents first argument:a. ) My opponent talks about how making start times later will effect the cost of buses. I would first like to say that while it will increase costs, in order to make improvements, money will almost always have to be spent. The article my opponent provides in this argument actually states:"With approximately 100,000 students per year divided into three tiers, it would cost roughly $150 per student each year to move each student in the two earliest start-time tiers to the latest start time. In comparison, an experimental study of class sizes in Tennessee finds that reducing class size by one-third increases test scores by 4 percentile points in the first year at a cost of $2,151 per student per year (in 1996 dollars). These calculations, while very rough, suggest that delaying the beginning of the school day may produce a comparable improvement in test scores at a fraction of the cost. " This shows that although this will increase costs, in comparison to the other viable methods of improving public education, this method is actually quite cost efficient. b. ) I opponent discusses that if you were to push all start times later, school days would be a lot longer. This however, is what the $150 per student mentioned in the quote above prevents. This small fee per student combines all schools into one time slot. This means that my opponent cannot get both impacts, and that his argument on family time is irrelevant as families will not lose time together. c. ) As my opponent is discussing the economic disadvantages of changing the system, I will discuss the economic disadvantages of keeping it the way it is now, with start times before 8:00 AM. I have proven that these early start times hurt the student both academically, and hurt their brain cells, which cannot be repaired, which hurts them later in life. If you disable whole generations through early start times, you are ensuring that later in life, when they are the ones running the world, their will be an economic downfall because the leaders will be less capable than their predecessors because of the lack of sleep. This early start time will take away from our countries field of future skilled workers, and effectively hurt the economy much more than a $150 per student per year cost will.5. ) in the end, my arguments about students being less able to function, and being injured in the long term have not been touched. My opponent attempted to show that they are wrong with an article that stated that people were able to achieve high GPAs in morning classes, but this did not even cover any of the long term harms to the students, and the article was about classes which started after 8:00, and it also said that the opposite was true. So my arguments still stand while my opponents were proven to be inconsequential to this debate. My opponents argument about the economic harms of later start times has also been proven to not effect this debate as I have shown it to be the method of improvement that hurts the economy the least and have shown how not taking steps to make this improvement will have future effects that will hurt out economy much much worse.