Every weekday morning, Ben Mingle struggles to drag himself out of bed.
“I wake up, I’m just exhausted,” says Mingle, a seventh-grader at O’Keeffe Middle School. “My parents have to wake me up two or even three times because the first time they wake me up I fall asleep immediately after.”
Mingle is hardly alone among his peers in Madison. All but two Madison middle schools start at 7:35 a.m., earlier than all elementary and high schools in the district. Getting out of bed so early isn’t just painful for kids Mingle’s age — it’s also unhealthy.
Most middle-schoolers are between 11 and 14 years old. According to the National Sleep Foundation, kids 6 to 13 should get nine to 11 hours of sleep a night. For Mingle, that’s just not possible.
“Since I started school, I’ve always had to get up at around the same time, but it was much easier when I was a little kid and I fell asleep earlier,” he says. “Now that I’m older and I want to stay up later, it’s harder to wake up at that same time.”
Madison school officials say they recognize the importance of sleep, but the logistics of starting later are complicated, and the shift would be difficult to make.
“A change would require close attention to a myriad of related issues — from transportation to child care to extracurricular activities,” says schools superintendent Jennifer Cheatham. “This is a complex topic, and a decision would take time and thoughtful consideration.”
In August 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a policy statement recognizing lack of sleep as a public health issue that significantly affects the safety and academic success of students in both middle and high school. The group urged that schools let students get 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep a night, recommending start times be no earlier than 8:30 a.m.
This year, the CDC published data showing fewer than one out of five middle and high schools in the U.S. follows the recommendation to start at 8:30 or later. Ten of Madison’s 12 middle schools start at 7:35 a.m., while four of its five high schools start around 8:15.
Stephen Small, a professor in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology and an expert on adolescent development, says it’s not surprising that most middle-schoolers don’t get enough sleep because they’re coping with the biological changes of puberty, a natural change in sleep cycles, and busier lives as they get older.
“You bring all those things together, and kids are going to bed later and later, and the fact that they have to get up early makes it more difficult, and it can have effects on their well-being,” says Small. “It’s not just that they’re tired. It can have an impact on their behavior, their academic performance and their mood.”
For months, school board member TJ Mertz has been urging the district to delay middle school start times. The board is scheduled to discuss start times at a meeting in June 2016.
“For the last three to four months, I’ve been pushing as hard as I can to get this on the board’s agenda sooner rather than later,” says Mertz. “I’m a parent of a middle school student. My son leaves for the bus at 10 minutes to 7 a.m. every morning, and for a significant portion of the school year that’s in the dark. It’s not healthy. All the research says it’s not healthy, and I think that if we can do something to change it, that would be great.”
Mike Hertting, the district’s chief of school operations, admits that lack of sleep is a concern, saying, “We know that when kids are tired and adults are tired that we just don’t function as well as we should.” However, he says making that shift is not as easy as hitting the snooze button.
“When you start making large-scale changes to really make a difference in start time, that requires much more of a comprehensive effort,” Hertting says. Delaying a start time affects food service, afterschool activities and transportation.
Any changes would affect Madison Metro, which contracts with the school district to bus middle and high school students (elementary students are transported by a private company).
Metro is operating beyond capacity, says Metro spokesperson Mick Rusch, so it asks the district to stagger school starting times.
“To do this, one bus is used to provide service to a middle school, then goes back out into the neighborhood and provides service to a high school,” Rusch writes in an email. “A number of years ago, when Metro began requesting bell time coordination in order to reduce the number of buses/drivers needed to provide service, the district favored middle schools receiving the earlier bell times versus the high schools.”
Delaying middle school starts would also hinder Metro’s ability to handle the morning work commute, Rusch adds. “If this were to happen, we estimate that we would need to use 15 more buses and drivers. We don’t have these 15 buses, and even if funding was available for their purchase, and funding available to hire these drivers, due to our limited garage space, we wouldn’t have anywhere to put them.”
Rusch fears other consequences of a later start. If schools start later, fewer parents will be able to drive their kids, so more students will ride the buses, further straining the system. And in the winter, students will have to walk home from bus stops in the dark, because school will be ending later.
Hertting says the ramifications to Metro underscore how complicated delaying school starts can be. “Most people just don’t understand how complex making a change is.”
Veronica Mingle, Ben’s older sister, just started her freshman year at Madison’s East High School. Her mom, Sally Jacobs, says that Veronica is “overjoyed” that she now starts school almost an hour later, at 8:15 a.m. This start time is still slightly earlier than health professionals recommend.
Even with the later start time, Veronica — a self-proclaimed night owl — only gets about seven hours of sleep a night.
“I’m pretty much always tired,” says Veronica. “There are very few [students] that are fully rested. I’m taking mostly honors, which means it’s kids who are really dedicated to school, so there are not a lot of people sleeping through class.” But, she adds, “There will be certain days where even I’m just staring at the teacher processing nothing, and that’s never fun.”
If Ben could have his way, he jokes that school would never start.
“If I had to pick an actual time, I would probably pick 9 a.m.,” Ben says. “So that people who want to stay up a bit later would have time to be able to get enough sleep.”