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Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

Overemphasizing high school sports leads to a schedule which causes sleep deprivation for most of the students and subsequent drop in academic performance.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...

"During football season in particular, the focus of American principals, teachers, and students shifts inexorably away from academics. Sure, high-school football players spend long, exhausting hours practicing (and according to one study, about 15 percent experience a brain injury each season), but the commitment extends to the rest of the community, from late-night band practices to elaborate pep rallies to meetings with parents. Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice."

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Substitute football for "ballet" and pep rallies for "debate team practice" and drop the completely non-relevant (and severely biased) quote about head trauma and see if you get the same reaction.

I know it's fun to pick on Football and jocks in general but I don't think we can have a serious debate on the subject when the bias is so obvious.

What about we make athletics part of the school day? Shocking I know, but if we recognize athletics as an important key to youth development and not something that has to happen after "real school" than maybe we might be able to tackle this issue of kids being so overwhelmed and having to stay up late just to stay afloat.

I don't think it's fair to make every student wake up unnaturally early for the sake of those with any kind of extracurricular activity, not just sports.

Harming school performance and sleep depriving developing children in the time that they need sleep the most, just to give a self-selected portion of the student body extra time for sports, debate team, student council, etc. makes absolutely no sense to me.

>What about we make athletics part of the school day?

We already did, it's called "gym."

Unnaturally early? If we really want to go that route we should consider that our ancestors, until very recent times, were generally well awake before 8:00 AM on any given day. Also they generally didn't stay up late by our current standards, generally in bed an hour or two after sundown. So the issue isn't 8:00 am is unnaturally early, it is most likely staying up unnaturally late that is the culprit.

We are not our ancestors ;) In all seriousness, sometimes we cannot look into the past to guide us as we as humans and culture have evolved to develop many new behaviors and biological traits. Our ancestors lived much shorter lives, in a vastly different world, doing vastly different type of work/schooling, I don't think it's fair to compare everything so literally.

I wish I could have gotten up at 8 or even 7AM when I was in school. We're talking about school starting hours, not wakeup times. You can't wake up just before the bell rings and teleport into class. Depending on how far you live from school, what transportation method you use (whether you ride a school bus, regular public transportation, are a spoiled brat that can get mommy to drive you, etc), what your responsibilities are outside of school, and so on, you may need to wake up a considerable amount of time before the school day officially begins.

My school started at 7:30AM, which required I get up just before 6AM, from middle school onward. I don't think that's a natural time to require growing teenagers to wake up at. It was still dark outside then, where I lived. Even amongst grown adults, those that can wake up that early and function without incurring a sleep debt are rare.

>So the issue.. is most likely staying up unnaturally late.

Kids naturally begin staying up and waking up later after they hit puberty. Trying to fight that is stupid and harmful.

You don't get straight out of bed into a classroom. As for the end of the day, you can either spend the rest of the daylight hours doing homework indoors and then go straight to bed, or you can go outside and do the homework later, after dark (requiring less than 8 hours of sleep). Which is the healthier lifestyle?

"gym" is a joke on many different levels ... but that's a different debate altogether. Also I take issue with the term "extracurricular" as it implies something separate from "actual" schooling. Maybe if these activities weren't tacked on after school like an afterthought more kids would be apt to take them up.

I hate to be pedantic, but I don't think "self-selected" is really accurate. In my, and most high schools, in my area, most people do at least one extracurricular, and most do many more than that.

If it's not self-selected, then who selects it?

I don't know why football practice can't just be a PE replacement credit. Other than your PE coaches can't be two places at once if they are also team coaches.

Not quite the same, you don't need daylight to do ballet or debate.

Neither ballet or debate needs natural sunlight.

My high school started at 7:40 AM and I never understood why. I've never forgiven them for (among a laundry list of similar evils) the effect 4 years of chronic sleep deprivation must have had on my developing brain. My alarm was set for 6 AM so I could catch a 7 AM school bus (I only lived about 15 minutes away, but the bus was slow, took a painful route, and arrived 10 minutes early). I had to place my alarm so that I'd have to get up and walk across the room to turn it off, or I'd never have woken up. It was generally pitch black at 6AM, so this eventually resulted in me slicing my finger wide open on the edge of a mirror as I reached clumsily and half-asleep for my alarm. I still have the scar.

I'd like to be able to say that it gives me closure to finally have an explanation, but honestly it just makes me madder that football was responsible.

I thought part of it was so they could use the same fleet of buses for HS/JHS/Primary.

Hmm, they definitely did do that. But couldn't they do that anyway if all the schools were at the same time? Admittedly you've have high schoolers and first graders on the same bus, but it would certainly save on fuel...

Three separate trips means a third the number of buses to service the same number of people (assuming equal distribution). And a third the number of drivers/etc.

That is a good reason to stagger school starting times. It doesn't explain the need to make HS and JHS start so early, or why on earth they would start earlier than primary school when young children tend to wake up earlier than teenagers anyway.

7:30 for primary/elementary school and 8:30 for HS and JHS would have been great (or maybe even 8 and 9 respectively), but I suppose some kids skipping class after their parents had left for work would ruin it for everyone.

EDIT: How much do you think reusing the bus fleets actually saves? Compared to have one big fleet that transports all schools at the same time, you need less buses, and probably save a little by paying less drivers for more time, but I'd expect the cost of fuel to dominate, which should be about the same regardless. Operating more busses also means that each is sustaining less wear per day as well.

My (very non-affluent) school started at 7:20, and the stated reasoning was to maximize the earnings opportunity for those students who had after-school jobs.

'Athletics even dictate the time that school starts each day: despite research showing that later start times improve student performance, many high schools begin before 8 a.m., partly to reserve afternoon daylight hours for sports practice."'

Seems like it might make more sense to put the training mid school-day. Exercise typically helps mental function.

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