But when it came time for public input, Don O’Brien made it clear that resistance to a 25-minute delay would be hard to overcome.

“You are putting our student-athletes at a disadvantage by having them get out at 3 o’clock,” O’Brien, a father of two Sag Harbor elementary-school students and a varsity soccer coach in a nearby town, told the board. “Every single contest that we play next year will be affected by a 3 o’clock time. Every practice and every single game.”

Another Sag Harbor parent, Rich Perello, took the microphone and decried what he saw as the district’s apathy toward athletics. “It seems like there’s a disconnect here between the people who are making the decisions and the kids who actually want to play sports,” he said.

In O’Brien and Perello’s view, Pierson’s athletic programs wouldn’t survive delayed start times. Sag Harbor is located at the east end of Long Island, and its student-athlete must often travel long distances to games in other districts. Later dismissal, the parents worried, could make getting to games on time more difficult. Plus, O’Brien and Perello pointed out, Pierson students share some sports teams with neighboring high schools, and coordinating practice could be tough if those schools start and end at different times.

But Lamontagne, who views start times as a student-health issue, is just as fervent about her cause as O’Brien and Perello are about theirs.

“I have been involved in this issue for many, many years, and I have yet to see around the country a community that raised this issue where the sports community didn’t come out and panic,” she told me. “The pattern is that they panic every time, the concerns are the same, and every single time, the concerns get addressed.”

The debate in Sag Harbor mirrors similar conversations in districts across the country. Hundreds of schools in 44 U.S. States have already delayed start times in response to sleep-science research. But in more than a few other districts, attempts to push back the opening bells have failed because of the kinds of concerns being voiced on Long Island.

On one side are parents who point to extensive research on sleep cycles of adolescents, effects of sleep on academic performance, and the safety risks associated with sleep deprivation. On the other are those who are worried about what changing start times would mean to their everyday lives—beginning with high-school sports. But given the startling correlation between poor sleep and athletic injuries in teenagers, perhaps those two camps have more in common than they realize.

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The research on school start times is unequivocal: Teenagers’ sleep cycles differ from those of adults. While an adult (or a young child) may have no trouble dozing off at 10 p.m., adolescent bodies aren’t wired to fall asleep before 11 p.m. If students are asked to wake up at 6 a.m. for a 7:30 a.m. first bell, they will struggle to record the recommended eight to 10 hours of sleep—or anything close to it.