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Parents, Advocates Rally For Late School Start Times

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By Evan Triantafilidis
Sentinel Correspondent

In efforts to rally around a later start time for Greenwich High School, a crowd of parents, students, physicians and bi-partisan support showed up to Town Hall to launch a petition for delayed school starting times on Thursday.

Led by Board of Education member Peter von Braun, the meeting focused on the benefits of moving the current start time of 7.30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. or later with speakers including First Selectman Peter Tesei, Frank Farricker, Greenwich Chapter Leader of the National Start School Later Organization Valerie Erde and many more.

“The major advantage would be improved health to the kids,” Erde, also a mother of two teens, said. “They’re tired. By the end of the year, they really suffer from burnout. There are also emotional benefits. Everyone knows teens are impulsive and being tired lowers your impulsivity threshold.”

During Erde’s plea for earlier start times, she held up a printed photo of three GHS students sleeping in their desks during an english class, face down with their heads in their arms.

“Studies or no studies, how can these kids be learning?” asked Erde. “There is a lot of research showing the strong connection between sleep and retention, sleep and cognition as well as sleep and academic achievement.”

According to a recent CDC study, an estimated 39,700 public middle, high, and combined schools in the nation start at an average time of 8:03 a.m. A school system start time of 8:30 a.m. or later provides teenage students the opportunity to achieve the 8.5–9.5 hours of sleep recommended by American Academy of Pediatrics and the 8–10 hours recommended by the National Sleep Foundation.

A May survey sent to local parents, students and teachers revealed that 75 percent of parents and 77 percent of students were in favor of the delayed start time. Of the staff polled, 45 percent support a later start time and 20 percent remain neutral.

“The gift of letting teens go to school when they are awake will happen because Greenwich parents have united in a bi-partisan campaign to push back the starting time at GHS to 8:30 a.m. or later,” von Braun said in his opening remarks.

“How many of your teens have come to you and said ‘Mom it’s 8:30 p.m. I’m going to go to bed so I can get my nine hours of sleep and go to school at 7:30 a.m.?’ It never happens.”

First Selectman Tesei also spoke in favor of changing the start times, citing the reports of numerous agencies and the endorsement from his wife who works in mental health.

“There’s tremendous merit to it,” Tesei said. “The question is how to get it done. I believe in it. I wish I was the recipient of a later start time in my day.”

Without politics getting involved, Tesei’s Democratic challenger Frank Farricker joined the fight for delayed start times with two teenagers of his own entering into ninth grade this fall.

“These kids walk acres a day,” Farricker, chair of the Democratic Town Committee said. “It’s one acre from end-to-end of the student center, but Greenwich High School is more than just a school. GHS, as anyone will tell you and as I found out when I went, equips our children far better than many other school districts.”

Farricker says that it’s often himself driving his teenagers to school after multiple times missing the bus. He says it’s because the kids are exhausted from not enough sleep despite several at-home measures already being taken.

“Later starting times is not a place of hidden agendas,” Farricker said. “It is very straight forward. Our most sacred duty as parents is to educate our children and to give our children the best they can possibly have, and it starts with the best school day they can get.”

As elected officials and parents discuss a revamp to their kids’ sleep and school schedule in public schools, a non-traditional approach is already in the works for battling old-school methods of scheduling.

Alternative schools like Fusion Academy allow 6th-12th grade students to have flexible scheduling while still taking the right amount of accredited high school courses. There is no set start and end time to school days and headmaster Jennifer Walsh-Rurak says schedule flexibility has been a benefit to those students who like to start school in later hours of the morning.

“Every full-time student typically has a seven-hour school day, but when that seven-hour day starts varies for each student,” Walsh-Rurak said.

Homework is done on site so students can have availability outside of school while having the one-on-one focus in the classroom as well. There are 31 Fusion Academies and counting, with the latest campus in Stamford coming this fall.

“We really need to look at kids as individuals,” Walsh-Rurak added. “Some students are more willing to take on more rigorous course work simply by nature of understanding that metacognitively they’re not at a place that says 9:00 a.m. is when calculus is going to really register with them. By shifting the start time to 9:30 a.m. or to 10:30 a.m., calculus is certainly something that is more manageable to them just based on their level of engagement and their ability to focus and attest a little bit later in the day.”

Other speakers at the meeting were Dr. Rose Fini, Dr. Gaetane Francis and clinical psychologist Beth O’Donnell, who spoke of numerous studies finding that kids, sometimes their very own, will benefit from the extra hour or more in the morning.

von Braun hopes to get up to 10,000 signatures on the petition to alter the school day hours for the 2016-17 school year. Petitions can be found at letkidssleep.com.

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