High School Hours

I am a former high school teacher and, accordingly, take a particular interest in many things "educational."

I saw something on CBS this morning about how middle school and high school kids aren't getting enough sleep, and I was utterly unsurprised. I spent numerous years seeing kids come in groggy eyed. Now, of course, I don't completely excuse the kids themselves in the following analysis . . . I know, it's shocking to think that there might just be a certain amount of laziness in teenagers.

BUT

It makes a lot of sense to consider pushing school back 2-3 hours. Teenagers require 8-10 hours/night of sleep, and it is simply not reasonable to expect them to get to bed every night by 10 p.m. When I taught, school went roughly from 8-3. Why not push that back 3 hours?

School starting at 11 a.m. would not necessitate a shortage of sleep.

My experience is that most "teenage trouble" happens from the time they get out of school until their parents get home from work. It certainly did for me. If I got out of school at 6, when would I have had time to get into trouble?

As far as sports and extra-curricular activities go, they could either be scheduled after school, until 9 o'clock or so, or in the morning. Exercise in the morning is good for teenagers, and may help cancel out negative effects of having to get up too early.

Now, of course there is the drawback of not having mom and dad there to make junior get up and go to school in the morning. However, methinks that the kids who would just skip school likely don't have a lot of parental enforcement of school attendance in the first place.

Another idea is to have the school open for 10 hours and simply require that teenagers get 7 classes in during that 10 hours. That would probably be something teachers would like, presuming that they aren't required to teach 10 classes per day and keep their current classload. Some teachers, based on the demand, would get in early and off early. Some would get in late and off late. It kind of seems like an efficient use of capital goods (classrooms) and flexible use of human capital.

I wonder how the community would react if Speedway H.S. went to this kind of a schedule. I would certainly be supportive, but I notice that many people think that high schools should simultaneously be (a) exactly like they used to be back in "the good old days," and (b) perfectly suited to modern requirements and knowledge. (Kind of hard to be both)