Asbury Park Press

Coming to grips with the end of summer is never easy. For many school-age kids and their parents, the hardest part is trying to adapt to a new sleep schedule. The routine of tweens and teens staying up late and waking up late comes to a jarring, crashing halt. It’s a nearly traumatic adjustment, not only for students but for the parents responsible for rousting them out of their slumber early in the morning. .

In many towns, it isn’t unusual for high school students, particularly those with long bus rides, to set their alarms before 6 a.m. Not only is that unpleasant, but it’s unhealthy.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that high school students get nine to 10 hours of sleep a night. Middle school students require slightly less sleep and elementary school students need an hour or two less. But the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey last year found that 75 percent of U.S. high school students get fewer than eight hours of sleep on school nights, and 43 percent get six or fewer hours.

A National Sleep Foundation poll found 59 percent of middle schoolers and 87 percent of high school students were getting less than the recommended hours of sleep on school nights.

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Study after study has confirmed that insufficient sleep in teens is associated with bad grades, obesity, migraines, depression and unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, drinking and drug use.

The American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014 recommended that classes not start before 8:30 a.m. But just 9 percent of the state’s high schools and middle schools have start times as late as 8:30 a.m. And only 17.7 percent of middle and high schools nationwide follow that recommendation. More than half start the school day before 8 a.m.

It wasn't always that way. In the 1950s and 1960s, most schools started between 8:30 and 9 a.m., according to the National Center for Health Research.

In response to the problem, the New Jersey Department of Education studied the issue and concluded in an April 2017 report what every other similar report had concluded: that teenagers would benefit from later school start times. But citing a host of obstacles to moving up starting times, such as higher busing costs, family concerns about child care and the impact on sports and other after-school activities, it recommended that it be left to individual districts to decide how to approach the issue.

Few districts have addressed it all. One exception is Princeton High School, which this fall is pushing back its starting time from 7:50 a.m. to 8:20 a.m. School will end at 3:21 p.m. instead of 2:51 p.m.

Will that half hour make a difference? What kind of problems will it cause for families that depend on older children to watch younger siblings while parents are at work? What impact will it have on busing costs and extracurriculars? Those are questions school superintendents, principals and parents all over the state should be looking to Princeton to help answer.

In the meantime, parents should set the tone early, making sure their kids get to bed and off their cellphones early enough to allow them to fully function the next day.