What we teach is as important as when we teach

When I was asked to write about a school-related issue, one of the recurring things educators argue about is what time of day school should begin. As insignificant as this issue may first appear, there is actually a lot of research and a lot at stake surrounding students and school start times.

For educators, this is one of those minefields of frustration where common practice and best practice collide. We know that there is clear, replicated research that shows that secondary students learn better later in the morning and elementary students are more suited for learning earlier in the day.

So why is our system structured in exact opposition to what we know?

The practicality of busing seems to be the most commonly cited reason for our start times. I have both some history and a solution to this.

Years ago, when I attended Palmer High School, first hour started at 8:40 a.m. Years later, as a new teacher under our current start times, I noticed in students something that was completely foreign to me as a student — students yearning for sleep, sleep after school, at lunch, on the weekends.

Students today routinely come to school tired, depleted — and for good reason. Students today get up at times that go against their biological clock. Teenagers’ bodies are changing at rates that are unprecedented in the life cycle. Students are in school when they are not optimally ready.

This should be changed.

Some will claim that changing school start times is too complicated, that it cannot be done, or that the community has grown too accustomed to our current routine to ever change. However, there is a historical school change precedent that successfully met the same intellectual and practical hurdles: the change to the school’s calendar.

For more than 10 years, I and other educators argued that the school’s calendar did not take full advantage of our Alaska seasons or educational best practice. However, we were repeatedly told that the fair, the community and that many educators themselves would never support the notion of starting schools before Labor Day. Yet as soon as the Anchorage School District changed its calendar, Mat-Su announced the very next day that we may also change.

And we did, the very next year.

Start times are a much less daunting challenge than the calendar change was. In fact, all the intellectual groundwork that necessitated changing our calendar is identical for changing our clock, because when we teach is as important as what we teach.

So here’s how we do it with sensitivity to all the parent, student, teacher and community shareholders. We commit today to changing next year’s school start times by 10 minutes.

Just 10 minutes.

The following year we do the same and we continue baby-stepping our way in the right direction until we bring our school start times in sync with educational research and students’ biological cycles.

An interesting dilemma that surrounds school start times is the dichotomy between employees and students. As we get older, getting up early becomes easier, more natural, which has a chilling effect on those who run the system from ever changing it for those for whom the system is designed to help. We old people can get up early and therefore the current schedule benefits us, but this is in direct opposition to our target audience — our students.

So I suggest changing the start times, gradually, responsibly, 10 minutes a year for a couple of years until we reach a window of reasonableness that is more in keeping with research. Our start times window of reasonableness for secondary schools — the area I know best — would be between 8-9 a.m. Ten minutes a year.

It’s one of those solutions that’s so simple it’s complicated.

Mark Okeson is an assistant principal at Wasilla High School.