MCPS Board and Superintendent, Please Wake Up to the Need for Healthier Secondary School Start Times!

Our teens need their sleep!

Elected MCPS board members are utterly unresponsive to this issue, making excuses or consistently avoiding the issue. Our child has to get up in the 6am hour to get to school (one wonders if any board members have to get up that early). It’s long overdue for a change in the secondary start times — or a change in those elected to the board members who continue to be negligent on this obvious issue.

LONG OVERDUE FFS GET THIS DONE

Not only is 7:45 too early for teens… 9:25 was too late of a start time for my elementary school children.

Medicine and hard data support later bell times for secondary school. Let's not sacrifice the health of our children for the sake of others' convenience.

I agree that this is so important to start school at a later time.

Silver Creek MS parent - future BCC HS parent

I have two teens at MCPS who already have physical and mental health challenges. Early school times exacerbate these. Please help my kids by acting on this issue.

This is a no brainer

Please shift the start time later for high schools in the county!

Teens got to start their day even before the sunrise

Please have high school start at a later time.

Please do the right thing and change the bell times!

I'm a psychologist and mother of an MCPS elementary aged child. I don't see the need for any student, be it child or teen, to be in class before 8:30. It's best for the cognitive functioning and mental health of all children (and adults) to be getting more sleep than they are currently.

Help teens in all aspects that helps their abilities to function daily and be more productive accordingly.

Science is on our side! Please do the right thing and give high school students a later start time.

Our entire family struggles with this early start time and our student is consistently late for first period, negatively impacting the grades for that class. Please change to a later start time. Teens need to sleep!

2 years ago Featured

I am parent of 2 adolescent MCPS students and a pediatrician. American Academy of Pediatrics has advocated for sleep and school times for children to be aligned with the scientific evidence. It is time we put our children on firm foundation for learning success and healthy well being.

We need schools to recognize the science behind teenage circadian rhythms and give them the chance to sleep. I'm sure we would see huge changes in teenage behavior, academic success, and health in general.

We moved from the Bay Area (CA) where we had a front-row view to the significant shift in alertness, improvement mood, increased engagement, and elevated outcomes from a later start time. The science backs this - let's be a school system that uses science to make decisions on our children's health and education.