Opinion: Middle Schools Should Start Earlier Than High School

When I was in middle school, I was getting around nine hours of sleep every night, no matter the time of year. I averaged about an hour or less of homework per day, even in advanced classes, and had enough extracurriculars to keep me occupied. 

Barely a week of sophomore year has passed, and I’m now lucky if I get six hours of sleep. I wake up at 5:30 every morning, when instead of the light streaming through the cracks in the blinds, I am greeted by the hazy dawn sky. I regularly have around four and a half hours of homework due to my intense AP and honors classes, and my extracurriculars occupy all of my free time, weekday or not.

So why, pray tell, did the Board of Education sacrifice the high schoolers, who work harder, play intense, demanding sports, or are active club members instead of the middle schoolers? 

Honestly, I’m not quite sure. I have my suspicions—like the fact that we use the most buses, and our schedule was easier to change. However, I know one thing for sure: the Board of Education didn’t think this decision through the long term—and here’s why. 

Greenwich High School is an objectively great school. Put your opinions of the people and the teachers aside—it offers dozens of AP and dual-enrollment classes, many different languages with countless sublevels, and gives students the best possible chances to get into a top college. We are state recognized for our AP, SAT, and ACT scores. By making the start time earlier for their students, the district is effectively hindering their student’s academic performance. An exhausted student with four hours of sleep will always score lower (be it on a standardized test or a quiz in chemistry) than a relatively well rested one.  

When you really think about it, you would hope that the Board of Education understands that an earlier start time will jeopardize their standardized test scores—an important factor that determines school rankings and benchmark standards—and choose to leave the high school schedule alone. Evidently not. Test scores may tank this year—and not because students have gotten dumber, and not because the teachers have suddenly turned incompetent. They simply are not getting enough sleep to sustain themselves in advanced classes, sports, and extracurriculars. 

However, it is important to acknowledge that not every student is in advanced classes, varsity sports, and a productive member of clubs. Even so, they still have work to do. Stress, of course, comes in other forms than just rigorous work. The classes they are in will still offer a considerable amount of homework, which throws off the student’s balance of fun and school. Every student deserves a healthy amount of sleep, not just the ones in APs. 

Also important for the Board of Education to have considered before making this decision was the mental health of high school students. High school is a time of immense change—losing or gaining friends, learning new things, being challenged (not to mention maybe having a job or siblings to take care of). It’s difficult enough to manage with a healthy eight hours of sleep. When students are waking up at 6 a.m., going to school for almost seven hours, at sports practice for two hours, and still have to come home, shower, eat dinner, and deal with a massive amount of homework, their mental health may crumble. Immense stress causes crippling school anxiety—whether it be in the form of test anxiety, social anxiety, or just the dread of stepping foot in the building—which is not the goal of Greenwich High School. The goal is to provide a productive and welcoming place to learn, not to stress students out, decrease their precious hours of sleep, and expect them to perform just as well—if not better—than last year.  

While middle schoolers do have to take standardized tests, these tests are not as crucial to their future. They don’t take the SAT or ACT, which help determine which colleges are in your target range, or AP tests, which is the culmination of a whole year of college-level coursework. Moreover, they are in a stage of life where it is okay to not give your all into school. It’s okay to get a C or a D in some of your classes—it’s not the end of the world for them. But for high schoolers, a C on your transcript can affect your college decisions. And if that C is due to sheer exhaustion from being overworked, then it isn’t a fair reflection of that student’s intellectual capacity. 

Middle schoolers do not work as much as high schoolers do, and that’s okay. That’s expected at their age. But it’s not fair to allow them to take hours of rest away from the high schoolers–whether they play sports or not, do clubs or not, or are in hard classes, high school is still an emotionally demanding period of time in one's life that requires adequate rest.

So, middle school should start earlier than high school. I’m not saying this for selfish reasons, not for the extra hour of sleep I got last year when school started at 8:30, but for the mental health and well-being of the student body at Greenwich High School, and for the district's standardized test scores.