Board member: Further discussion should consider elementary students’ sleep needs

By Ashley M. Casey

Staff Writer

The science has spoken, and now the students have, too: Kids in the Liverpool Central School District need more sleep.

Dr. Daniel Lewin of the Children’s National Health System, who has acted as the district’s consultant on the modified school start time issue, presented the results of a survey on student sleep habits conducted earlier this year to the Liverpool school board at its Sept. 24 meeting.

Lewin said 1,175 students and 526 stakeholders — parents, teachers and others in the Liverpool school community — responded to the survey, which was administered at the end of last school year. About half of the students who responded were in middle school: 29 percent of respondents were in seventh grade and 23 percent were in eighth grade. The overwhelming majority of stakeholders polled were parents, who made up 79 percent of stakeholder respondents.

Superintendent Dr. Mark Potter said the survey results would be made available on the district’s website. The Star-Review has broken down some of the survey’s key statistics. Read on:

Key findings

• LHS starts too early: Lewin said 59 percent of respondents said high school classes start too early — but parents of elementary-aged children were the largest group of respondents who deemed the start time too early.

• Preferred start times: Survey-takers’ average ideal start times were just after 8 a.m. for elementary, middle and high schoolers. The average preference for elementary school was 8:14 a.m. and preferred times for middle school and high school were 8:09 a.m. and 8:13 a.m. respectively.

• Parents’ top concerns: Chief among stakeholders’ concerns about changing school start times were parent work schedules, before school and afterschool childcare, student employment schedules and athletics schedules. Other concerns included traffic, staff commute times and community use of school facilities.

• Sleep reported vs. sleep needed: Middle schoolers reported getting an average of 7.84 hours of sleep each school night and said they needed 9.12 hours. High schoolers are getting even less sleep — 7.08 hours — but said their ideal is 8.69 hours.

Lewin said 11th- and 12th-graders need a minimum of 8 hours of sleep, and younger kids need even more. However, 26 percent of high schoolers and 50 percent of middle schoolers who responded said they sleep 8 or more hours per night.

On the weekends, students reported getting 9 hours and 45 minutes of “catch-up sleep.”

“The message here is that when you get this much of a jump —a two-hour or more jump in sleep time on weekends versus weeknights — something is definitely going on in terms of either sleep need or sleep timing,” Lewin said.

The consequences of not getting enough sleep, Lewin said, include diminished academic performance and increased risk of depression, diabetes, risky behavior, tardies and absences, and automobile accidents.

Lewin said 42 percent of driving-age Liverpool students said they have driven while drowsy, and 25 percent have nodded off at the wheel.

Why aren’t kids getting the sleep they need?

• Puberty: Circadian rhythms shift during puberty, causing adolescents’ sleep cycles to kick in about two hours later than young children or adults.

• Interruption of REM: Lewin said most schools start in the middle of the last cycle of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep for adolescents, which may last until 9 a.m.

• Social jet lag: Students may keep later hours on the weekend, and when they have to return to an earlier schedule come Monday morning, Lewin said it is like having to adjust from Hawaii’s time zone to New York’s.

• Sleep debt vs. sleep banking: Lewin said the body can make up for one or two nights of insufficient sleep by tacking on a few more hours in the following nights, but oversleeping on the weekends cannot make up for a school week’s worth of poor sleep.

• Blue light: The screens of phones, computers and televisions emit blue light, which mimics daylight and delays the production of the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin. But Lewin noted that kids are not just exposed to excessive blue light from their own social media scrolling and Netflix marathons.

“Adolescents get all these fingers wagged at them around using electronics, but what else are you doing on your computers at night? At least for my son, who is 17, a huge amount of his work is on the computer. The vast majority of his schoolwork comes through an electronic device,” Lewin said.

Discussing the data

While the Liverpool district’s discussion of school start times largely has focused on high-schoolers and middle-schoolers, Lewin said elementary-schoolers may not be getting enough sleep either. Children between the ages of 6 and 12 need 9.5 to 12 hours of sleep.

BOE member Stacey Balduf urged her colleagues not to lose sight of little kids’ needs during the modified school start time discussion.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations at this board level about what to do about the high school with the idea if kids got to get on a bus at 7 a.m. for elementary it’s okay,” she said. “If you can’t do a one-tier plan or a two-tier ‘everybody go after 8:30,’ I don’t know how we meet any of these [sleep needs].”

Lewin said Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, where he served as a modified school start time consultant, ultimately moved its high school and elementary school times later and its middle school times earlier. Fairfax County school officials decided that it was more crucial for elementary-schoolers and high-schoolers to start school later, so they could afford to miss out on those benefits during the two intervening years of middle school.

“I don’t feel that this board is at a place to say which is better and which isn’t, but I guess we’re going to anyway,” Balduf said.

Lewin said starting school later may not fix students’ sleep problems. He cited one study that showed improvement in student sleep habits during the first year of a school district’s implementation of a later start time, but the benefits did not remain in the second year. That said, there are still few studies on the subject.

Ultimately, Lewin said, the benefits of starting school later outweighed the downsides for Fairfax County.

“You’re not going to be hurting a large group of people. It’s going to be inconveniencing many in the very short-term, it will be hurting some in the long-term, helping others in the long-term also,” he said, concluding that there is a “preponderance of evidence” of the health benefits of starting school later.

Education, Lewin said, is a key factor in getting enough sleep. He said information about healthy sleep habits and the sleep cycle should be included in health class curricula.

Nicholas Blaney, who was elected to the school board in May, and BOE President Craig Dailey agreed that the district should incorporate sleep education as well.

“Our lifestyle is more of a problem than the actual timing,” Dailey said.

School board member Richard Pento said the pros could outweigh the cons, especially the long-term health consequences of not getting enough sleep.

“It seems that none of these issues there are totally insurmountable. And for as many perceived losers, perhaps, or inconveniences, we do gain winners,” Pento said. “I don’t think we have to pit one group against another. I just hope that we as a collective realize that we’re in a student-centered business, and as opposed to adult decisions driving everything, I wish that student decisions and student outcomes would drive things a little bit more.”

Balduf proposed a motion to see if the board wanted to continue discussing the modified school start time issue.

“We can always revisit it when we have more money, when we have other stuff. We can see how it goes with education,” she said. “It’s not going to be something that’s going to come on for board discussion again unless there’s five people that want to talk about this. I’m going to admit it: I don’t want to talk about changing the school start time anymore.”

Pento said a motion would be premature without having data about the cost and logistics, and the board would be remiss in leaving the discussion for another time.

“This idea that the situation that we have … is already perfect is not accurate,” Pento said. “We are here in the business of servicing the needs of students. … Yet what we’re looking at now is, ‘Let’s take this potential health and well-being thing and shelve it because it’s an inconvenient conversation.’”

Pento said the district often says cost is a barrier to pursuing certain issues, but it is not an insurmountable obstacle.

“I’m more than happy as a board not to go to the NYSSBA [New York State School Boards Association] conference for one time. That’s $10,000 right there,” he said. “We find money when we want to.”

“We are fiscally responsible first and everything goes around kids. My priorities are spending money elsewhere,” Balduf said. “I don’t want to be the district that throws middle school under the bus.”

Pento said the district already threw middle-schoolers under the proverbial bus when it set a 7:19 a.m. start time for Chestnut Middle School.

Board member Kevin Van Ness said changing start times is a district-wide health issue and he, like Pento, would like to see data before moving forward.

“We have been talking about this for a long time, but we never get to the point where we talk nuts and bolts,” Van Ness said. “We as a district have come to a point where we must implement something or not, and I’m of the voice that we need to get some numbers so we have something concrete to talk about.”

Dailey agreed with Balduf that the board should make a motion to put together a cost analysis. Balduf made the motion to consider costs only for plans that fit every age group’s ideal sleep/wake times. The board passed the motion 7-2, with Pento and Van Ness voting no. Pento said trying to find a solution that fits every single student’s sleep needs is unrealistic.

“You want to bring something to a screeching halt? Pursue perfection,” Pento said, “and you’ll never get there.”