The Wayland School Committee is running a series of public meetings to explore changes to school start times at each of the Town’s schools possibly starting with the 2017-18 school year. Meetings are scheduled at Town Building for November 9 at 7pm and November 29 at both 9am and 7pm.

For most of us with older students in our schools, it came as no surprise when the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued their recommendation two years ago that schools need to prioritize our students’ sleep and therefore high schools and middle schools should not start before 8:30am.  We know how hard it is for our kids to get up each morning, clearly not having slept enough the night before, groggy and chronically sleep deprived.  The research is clear that a later start to the school day is beneficial for high school and middle school students, and a myriad of other medical organizations have all joined the AAP in advocating for a shift in the school day to accommodate our students’ natural sleep patterns.  In response, school districts across the Commonwealth and the country are either considering or already have adjusted their start times later.

We know from talking with our older students, and from reviewing survey results and research studies, that most of our students are getting less than seven hours of sleep per night, when they require 8.5-9 hours.  The consequences of sleep loss are non-trivial: they include reduced academic performance, a host of mental health impacts including increased risk of depression and anxiety and physical health impacts ranging from reduced immunity, increased risk of diabetes, risky behaviors, athletic injuries and higher rates of car accidents.  

Those with younger students often wonder why these kids don’t just go to sleep earlier.  The sleep research details how chemical shifts that occur around the time of puberty make it difficult for students this age to get to sleep at an hour that is early enough to make sufficient sleep even possible with early start times.  

With the AAP recommendation and all this research in mind, the Wayland School Committee is exploring changing our school start times beginning in the next school year.  We recognize that there are obstacles. While the research is clear that high school and middle school students benefit from later start times ( (a collection of links to available research is online here: https://goo.gl/ia7Xxv), there is little research on younger students, and there are challenges in implementation that we would need to address.  For example, Wayland uses one set of buses to run two sets of routes – they currently first pick up high school and middle school students and deliver them to school, then pick up our elementary school students.  Unless we add buses (at considerable cost) to run the elementary routes separately, any change to the high school and middle school routes will require changes at the elementary level as well.  Obvious options are to:

• push all start times later (probably by a half-hour),
• swap elementary and secondary start times (requiring an earlier start time for elementary students),
• combine these two approaches (having elementary start first, but also then pushing the start times out)

For more information on possible timings, some example options are detailed online here: goo.gl/kMBWFk

Other challenges involve families and staff adjusting their schedules to the new start times, and minimizing any impacts on athletic and extracurricular programs, child-care options and after-school programs.

The School Committee will be hosting three public meetings to discuss the rationale for exploring a change and the challenges we will need to address and mitigate to make any change successful.  We invite all Wayland families to attend one of these events to learn more and provide feedback.  

Meetings are scheduled at Town Building for November 9 at 7pm and November 29 at both 9am and 7pm.  We hope you will join us.