A memorandum dated Sept. 11, 2012, lists the Fiscal Year 2014 Board Operating Budget Interests. Among the Top 10 Priorities, I was impressed to note that the second item was this:
"Meet the needs of each individual child, including their health and social and emotional well-being"
This is exciting because it opens the door for Montgomery County's administration to consider changing the school start time to one that better reflects adolescent and teen sleep needs. The evidence that a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call for teenagers is dangerously out of sync with their sleep needs is more than clear. Parents, sleep scientists, educators, health-care providers and mental-health experts are calling for this change and we need to look seriously at the long and short-term impact on our kids' health.
Other issues like after-school jobs, bus schedules, sports practices can be accommodated and have been successfully adjusted in many other school districts. A very recent study takes a careful look at five years of data from the change to a later start time in Edina and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is not an impossible challenge.
It is impossible to justify causing harm to a child's health and social and emotional well-being through inaction.
I'm inspired by the local school board and its willingness to make this a priority. The document further states: "These top 10 interests are to guide the Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools in the development of his Fiscal Year 2014 Operating Budget Recommendation."
Good luck to Superintendent Joshua Starr - we'll be watching and hoping that a healthy school start time is soon part of the plan for Montgomery County.
Start School Later is a volunteer national coalition. We are dedicated to increasing public awareness about the relationship between sleep and school hours and to ensuring school start times compatible with health, safety, education, and equity. Please visit our website to learn more at www.startschoollater.net. We would like to hear from you!
We've successfully helped the Seattle School district fight a crazy change to an even earlier hour by providing them with all the data they needed to make the case to their school board. We have chapters in several counties and would love to support the creation of a group in Montgomery. This county leads others in Maryland education in so many ways, maybe leading the charge to make this critical change for the sake of our kids can be next. There's a facebook page started by a high school student that you could join and energize the dialogue: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Move-Montgomery-County-High-School-Start-time-to-830-am-or-later/221125037917648 and also check out http://www.facebook.com/#!/StartSchoolLater for our page - always current. Start School Later been working hard at this for a year now - and we're ready to grow. We need help to try and reach all of the government agencies, elected officials and members of the community that we've determined are going to be crucial in moving this initiative forward. Thanks for your comments!