Students across the country are constantly sleep-deprived and exhausted. From doing homework all night to waking up early every morning, these teens are not getting a healthy amount of sleep. Doctors recommend teens get between 8-9 hours of sleep a night but many of us are unable to get the sleep we need due to waking up before sunrise to go to school. The start time at Haddonfield Memorial High School is 7:57 (8:15 on block days). Many students are relying on coffee and energy drinks to give them the energy they need but these are unhealthy supplements and building a reliance on caffeine is unhealthy for teenagers to make a habit of. For students to be fully awake and able to learn the common denominator is to make school start later. Being able to cut classes by 3 minutes each and cutting lunch by 9 minutes will allow us to be able to start normal days at 8:30 and cut block classes down by 5 min and lunch by 10 minutes so we can start at 8:45. This will allow students to have the ability to get the sleep that is required for them to actively learn and not build unhealthy habits or sleepwalk thru their classes. This simple solution will hardly cut down the classes for teachers as the first couple minutes of class are often wasted and not fully used anyway; having class start once the period starts will allow teachers to still have the amount of teaching time they had before. Below are stats we found from our survey which reached over 90 students in HMHS.

Data:

• 57.1% of HMHS students said that they are exhausted in the morning
• 61.6% of students said that they do not feel awake until periods 3-4
• The average time that HMHS students wake up is 6:50 AM (The sunrise is around 7:20 during the fall and winter seasons )
• The average time that HMHS students go to sleep is 11:20 PM
• Only 30.8% of students always haven time to eat breakfast in the morning.
• 90.1% of students would like school to start later
• The average time students would like school to start is 8:35 AM