Parents, pediatricians, and policymakers alike have increasingly pushed districts to start school later in recent years so that older students can get more sleep.
They argue that sleep is essential for healthy development and academic success. But district leaders say shifting school schedules is more complicated than it seems on the surface, involving a tangle of family, employee, and logistical considerations that can be difficult to balance.
Those arguments came to a head in Florida this year, when lawmakers repealed a 2023 bill that gave districts and charter schools until 2026 to start middle schools no earlier than 8 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Florida was only the second state, after California, to set this kind of requirement.
“The feedback is overwhelming,” state Sen. Jennifer Bradley, who sponsored the repeal, told colleagues in a March 3 education committee hearing. “A state mandate on school start times would present incredible challenges, financially and otherwise.”
Here’s what you need to know about the ongoing debate.
What time should school start?
The American Academy of Pediatrics said in an influential 2014 policy statement that middle and high schools should aim to ring the first bell after 8:30 a.m. to help confront “the epidemic of delayed, insufficient, and erratic sleep patterns among adolescents.”
“Although many changes over the course of adolescence can affect the quality and quantity of sleep, one of the most salient and, arguably, most malleable is that of school start times,” the statement said. “Numerous studies have demonstrated that early start times impede middle and high school students’ ability to get sufficient sleep.”
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine also advocates for an 8:30 start time, citing factors like school tardiness, teen driver safety, and students’ psychological well-being.
When do most secondary schools actually start?
Despite recommendations from scientists, most secondary schools start earlier, typically 20-30 minutes earlier, but sometimes far more than that.
Twenty-eight percent of public high schools started at 8:30 or later in the 2020-21 school year, according to the most recent federal data, and 9% started before 7:30. The average high school start time was 8:07.
Among middle schools, 30% started at 8:30 or later, the data show, and the average school started at 8:11.
How much sleep do students need?
Students ages 13 to 18 should regularly get eight to 10 hours of nightly sleep “to promote optimal health,” the American Academy of Sleep Medicine said in a 2016 consensus statement. But most teens aren’t getting enough.
In 2023, 22% of female high school students and 25% of male high school students reported sleeping eight hours a night, according to survey data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number has gradually decreased over time; 35% of males and 29% of females reported adequate sleep in 2013.
Why can’t students just go to bed earlier?
Why can’t teens just go to bed earlier? It’s a logical idea, but doctors say it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Around the onset of puberty, teens’ sleep-wake cycle, also known as the circadian rhythm, shifts as much as two hours later than the average adult’s, the Academy of Pediatrics says. Teens’ bodies secrete melatonin, the hormone that triggers sleepiness, much later than adults, affecting their daily rhythms.
That later cycle may help teens keep up with demands like homework, after-school jobs, and active social lives, the academy said in its 2014 statement.
“As a result, most teenagers stay up late on school nights, getting too little sleep, and then sleep in on weekends to ‘catch up’ on sleep,” the statement said. “Although this weekend oversleeping can help offset the weekly sleep deficit, it can worsen circadian disruption and morning sleepiness at school.”
What makes changing school start times challenging?
Changing school start times is a lot more complicated than ringing the first bell a little bit later, district leaders say.
Transportation is among the biggest challenges. With limited drivers and buses, districts must organize complicated routes, sometimes running the same buses twice a day to pick up students at various grade levels. Changing schedules for a handful of schools can be like pulling a joker out of the bottom row of a house of cards, creating disruption at every level.
“You can’t just pick up and change your high school times in isolation,” a spokesperson for the Anne Arundel County, Md., school district, told Education Week in 2023.
When the district delayed high school start times by about an hour in 2022-2023, starting the day at 8:30 a.m., it also had to offer after-school child care so families with younger children could adapt to schedule shifts.
In some other districts, parents have complained that later high school dismissals mean their older children can’t be home to supervise their younger children in the afternoons. In many communities, elementary schools start later than secondary schools, though scientists suggest those schedules should be flipped.
“The major obstacle for our district is school transportation and lack of supervision of students in the afternoon,” an unnamed district reported in a Florida Senate analysis of the recent repeal bill. “As it stands now, our school start times would need to flip, meaning many of our youngest students who live in the most rural areas will be outside in the darkness waiting on the bus.”
Other concerns voiced by districts and lawmakers include timing for after-school extracurricular activities and employees’ objections to shifted work schedules.
Have other states mandated later school start times?
Yes, though mandates are rare.
In California, the only other state with such a requirement, a policy that took effect in 2022 requires middle schools to start no earlier than 8 a.m. and high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m.
While states including Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, and New Mexico have passed incentives to encourage later start times or assembled committees to study them, no other state has passed such mandates, according to Start School Later, an organization that advocates for such policies.
Maryland lawmakers proposed a minimum start-time bill in the 2025 legislative session, but it failed, according to a tracker maintained by the National Conference of State Legislatures. A Massachusetts bill that would require high schools to start no earlier than 9 a.m. is pending, but it has not yet been considered by either legislative chamber.
A Connecticut bill that would have required a study of later school start times failed.
