Not many schools have adopted later start times for schools, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that it’s better for students. Stock.adobe.com photo by Have A Nice Day.
Only 22.5% of Maryland’s high school students and 49.4% of middle school students surveyed for the 2022-2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey self-reported sleeping eight hours or more on a school night, when they need closer to nine to 10 hours of sleep. A major factor in this chronic sleep deprivation is the well-documented biological shift in adolescent sleep cycles, resulting in falling asleep later and waking up later than adults and younger siblings.
As a result, teenagers’ sleep-wake schedules are misaligned with school district imposed early school bell times (and commutes). Chronic sleep deprivation and misaligned sleep-wake schedules (known as social jet lag) negatively impact student physical and mental health, decision making, safety, attendance and graduation rates.
School systems have understood the connection between school hours and chronic adolescent sleep deprivation for decades yet are not taking action on this health priority. This failure undermines their Blueprint for Maryland’s Future efforts. School start times require state intervention, as local control is not effective in changing bell-time policies.
In 2014, Maryland acknowledged the connection between school hours and student sleep when it was the first state in the nation to pass legislation related to school bell times. The resulting joint report by the departments of Health and Education encouraged school systems to conduct feasibility studies to evaluate starting schools after 8 a.m. Two years later, the General Assembly created a recognition system to acknowledge the efforts of school systems to educate their communities while implementing age-appropriate bell times.
Despite landmark legislative encouragement from the General Assembly, school start time changes have been incremental. In fact, both Prince George’s County (2024) and Baltimore City (2022) have moved school start times earlier, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.
The Abell Foundation’s concerns about the earlier school hours for Baltimore City’s students led it to commission a study, published in September, recommending later, developmentally appropriate school start times in Baltimore City.
The Abell Foundation was also one of the key sponsors of the “2024 National Conference on Adolescent Sleep and School Start Times: Science and Implementation” at Loyola University Maryland in October. The foundation’s study analyzed school start times as a social determinant of health, which disproportionately harms the city’s academically and socially vulnerable students.
The report’s five recommendations begin with later bell times for Baltimore City Public Schools. In addition, school hours in Baltimore may need to begin later in the morning than other Maryland school systems, as the city must account for the reliance on public transportation and school choice, resulting in long commutes with multiple transfers.
Early school start times mean early release times, which present opportunities for unsupervised youth to get into trouble. In 2018, the Department of Juvenile Services testified before the General Assembly on a spike in afternoon teen crime, recommending later school start times as a tool to interrupt the misconduct cycle.
The Abell Foundation report endorses that 2018 recommendation by identifying later release times as supportive of misconduct prevention efforts, and encourages the expansion of policies and programs to reduce unsupervised time after school.
The report further recommends community sleep health education and engagement as important to successful implementation of new bell times. Community sleep health education would engage community members, families, local businesses, and others in the opportunity to understand the benefits of healthier bell times and ways to support healthy student (and adult for that matter) sleep. Education is also vital to understand the community’s questions about a change in school hours (child care, youth employment, etc.) and collectively identify and implement potential solutions to address those concerns.
The final recommendation from the Abell report addresses the start time issue beyond Baltimore City by encouraging statewide school start time legislation. As noted in the 2014 joint study, “in preserving the status quo whereby school start times are a matter for each local jurisdiction, the state risks letting local resistance trump a strong body of scientific evidence that sleep is critical to health and academic achievement.”
That is why Del. April Miller (R-Frederick), a former school board member, will refile her legislation establishing guardrails for school hours (no middle school before 8 a.m. and no high school before 8:30 a.m.) for consideration in the 2025 legislative session, similar to legislation passed in California (2018) and Florida (2022).
We encourage Maryland’s state senators and delegates to join as co-sponsors of Miller’s bill to keep Maryland on track to be the third state in the nation to set a minimum standard of safe, healthy, and age-appropriate school hours to benefit the state’s youth.