Newport Begins Discussion to Explore Later School Start Times

NEWPORT, RI—As school districts across the county move to start school later, Newport is beginning its own conversation.

On Monday night at 6 p.m., an informational meeting will be held for parents of students at Rogers High School during which the idea of starting school later will be explored.

Supporters of later start times point to research that shows the teenage brain benefits from extra sleep in the morning. And high school-age students are naturally wired to be more productive later in the day and stay up late at night.

The meeting will be in the Rogers High School library.

Parents on the school’s listserv should have received a link to a survey.

The sticking points in the later start time discussions typically revolve around busing, coordinating schedules with the elementary and middle schools and the effect on after-school activities and sports.

In East Greenwich, the School Committee approached the subject by convening a special committee with a cross-section of community representatives to gather feedback, data, concerns and tackle the logistical issues. That group met for months and heard hours and hours of testimony before giving a later start time a positive recommendation. That prompted the School Committee there to vote in favor, though the final time, as a result of compromise, was 30 minutes later instead of an hour.

During the conversation in East Greenwich, many students said that they are so overloaded with school and after-school activities, later start times would end up causing them to stay up even later, since school would end later. Their workloads would not decrease, they said.

Some students said they were so overwhelmed by their schedules, some extracurricular activities were meeting before school started because of competition from sports after school.