School days are too long and make students too tired and less successful in school.

Having a long school day physically exhausts students. This is true all year and especially true towards the end of the year where students must take many tests. These tests include AP tests and final exams.

Junior Vineet Reddy also believes that the school day is too long and as a student, is directly affected by it. Reddy said, “I don’t like starting school early because it just kills my vibe, especially when we have finals and AP testing. It is hard to get a good night sleep, like teachers expect, due to the long school day and studying on top of that.”

Because of the lack of sleep, students are not performing as well as they can be when it comes to these tests.

Educator Dave Arnold of the National Education Association believes that long school days can negatively affect everyone. He wrote, “[Some] schools are experimenting with an 8 hour school day…I hope that policy makers…will consider every aspect [before they allow this].”

By the time students are done with school, they are already tired. However, what adds even more stress is that most also do homework outside of school. If they are not doing homework or studying, they have other extracurricular activities like sports or clubs.

Ryan Pubentz is a history teacher that values time with his students but also believes a shorter day may be beneficial. He said, “I value the time with my students however, I also know students are involved in other extracurricular activities or sports so [a shorter day] would benefit them because they may be less likely to have to leave school early.”

When students are done with everything, it is already late, so they are not getting enough sleep.

Going to sleep early however is not simply the solution. This is because experts say that most teens cannot fall asleep before 11 P.M, anyway. Starting the school day later would definitely solve this problem.

Rachel Gary is a parent and the director of the Hartford area chapter of Start School Later INC. who also writes articles for The Courant in Connecticut. Gary wrote, “With most high schools starting before or by 7:30 a.m., this means that high school students are highly likely to lack the amount of sleep they need to function well, learn and stay healthy — by a lot.”

If schools insist on ending at the same time, that is fine by me. However, I want to see school start later to make up for this. A perfectly reasonable daily time would be around 9:30 A.M, and not just once a week.

Daniel Willingham is a cognitive scientist and professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”. Willingham writes, “[Sleep deprivation] seems to affect executive function tasks such as working memory. In addition, it has an impact on new learning… [Students] may be less able to sustain attention for long periods of time when at school…”

School is definitely important and getting an education is necessary to survive. However, I believe that going to school for seven and a half hours, from 7:30 until 3:00, like many schools including Mayfield do, is just ridiculous.

Further, Jessica Lahey is a contributing author for The Atlantic and is an English teacher who says that some school districts have already started to delay the start of school by one hour, giving students extra time to sleep.  Lahey wrote these students also experienced, “less daytime sleepiness, less tardiness, fewer attention/concentration difficulties, and better academic performance.”

Although class time is important, it is also important to find the right balance in order to give students enough time for other activities outside of school.

Reddy believes that school would just be much better shorter. He also said, “School days need to start later. School adds stress, [especially] when the day is too long. No one wants to be at school since they are so tired. Other schools start later, so should we.”