Guilford Made Move To Start School Later; Will State Soon Follow?

GUILFORD, CT - For years towns, such as Guilford, that have wanted to take on the issue of having schools start later to give kids more time to sleep have had to take on the difficult task alone.

Only a handful of towns have done what's Guilford done - as the issue is complex, trying to coordinate bus schedules, sports schedules, parents' work schedules, etc.

But nobody has disputed the studies that say kids - especially older ones - do better when they get more sleep.

And some state politicians have noticed - as in the myriad of bills proposed to the General Assembly's Education Committee are a few that call for the entire state to move back school start times.

One of those bills calls for "prohibiting regular scheduled instruction classes before 8:30 a.m. in any public middle of high school."

The bill's reasoning is: "to establish safe, healthy and developmentally appropriate school hours."

Another bill proposes forming a task force to study, and possibly make recommendations, on a statewide strategy of later school school start times.

Having a bill proposed is only the first step, however, in getting it to be a law. The state has tried to tackle the issue in past years, but it hasn't made it.

To become a law - the Education Committee would have to hold hearings, vote it out of committee. It would then have to adopted by the House and Senate - and then signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont.

Guilford, along with Wilton and Greenwich have moved to later start times. Guilford has moved its high school start time 15 minutes later and middle school start time 1o minutes later this year.

Besides those two and Guilford, school officials in Bridgeport, Cheshire, Ridgefield, Westport, and West Hartford, among others, have held various levels of discussion about starting later.

In Guilford, the system has been studying options to delay start times since 2014. In 2017, Superintendent of Schools Paul Freeman and the Board of Education convened a task force of administrators, school board members, teachers, parents, students, and medical professionals to make recommendations.

In its report, the task force said: “Sleep deprivation is a common problem in teenagers. Currently, fewer than 10 percent of teenagers in the United States are getting the recommended amount of sleep on weeknights, and the amount of sleep that teens get decreases as they proceed through high school.”

The National Sleep Foundation found that research shows the natural tendency for teenagers is to stay up late at night and wake up later in the morning. This research indicates that school bells that ring as early as 7 a.m. in many parts of the country stand in stark contrast with adolescents’ sleep patterns and needs.

Evidence suggests that teenagers are indeed seriously sleep deprived. A recent poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation found that 60 percent of children under the age of 18 complained of being tired during the day, according to their parents, and 15 percent said they fell asleep at school during the year.