Wake-up call for schools

By Emily Richmond

Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006 | 7:11 a.m.

With parents armed with research showing sleepy teenagers make poor students, the Clark County School Board is re-examining the volatile topic of school start times.

The 7 a.m. start for high schools has been a particularly sore spot with parents for years. But the School District says it is stuck with a transportation problem.

The school bus fleet of 1,300 is not large enough to pick up high school, middle school and elementary students at the same time. So drivers make three separate runs, transporting 145,000 students each day at an annual cost of $70 million. Adding enough buses to pick up high school and middle school students at the same time would cost $77 million, district officials say.

The other option, moving the start of high school to later in the morning, creates a domino effect, pushing back the start and end of classes at middle and elementary schools, putting elementary pupils on the streets after dark in winter.

Yet despite those distasteful options, the district is taking another look. The School Board will hold a special meeting at 4 p.m. Thursday to let parents sound off.

"We're trying to determine if whether the solution is better than the problems it might create," said Walt Rulffes, newly selected superintendent of the Clark County School District. "That's why we want to hear from the public, to make sure everyone realizes this isn't a quick remedy situation."

Research has shown that adolescents typically perform better at school as the day progresses. The circadian rhythms of teenagers are vastly different from other age groups, sleep researchers say. Most adolescents are more alert in the late evening than in the early morning hours. And even with earlier bedtimes, teenagers typically don't reach REM sleep until well after midnight, studies show.

In a landmark study of teenagers' sleep habits, professor Mary Carskadon of Brown University followed 40 10th graders as they made the switch to a 7:20 a.m. school start time, an hour later than their start time as ninth graders. The students' bedtimes stayed the same, at about 10:40 p.m.

As part of the experiment, the students were given the opportunity to go back to sleep once they arrived at school. Within five minutes, about half of the students fell into REM sleep, the deepest of the five sleep stages. Carskadon and her research team determined the students were not only sleep-deprived, but spending their first classes of the day only minimally awake.

Those findings come as no surprise to many Clark County parents, who say they must pry their own drowsy children out of bed to get them to school on time.

"I drive past the school bus stops at 5:45 a.m. full of kids waiting in the dark," said Lorrie Curriden, the mother of four Clark County students. Curriden teaches a 6 a.m. Mormon seminary class near Palo Verde High School. "I realize the district is facing logistical problems, but our children are operating on a huge sleep deficit."

Her son Christian, a sophomore at Palo Verde High School, said he knows his morning routine could be even worse.

"Some of the girls in my class have to get up at 4:30 a.m. to do their makeup and hair," Christian said. "All I have to do is grab something to wear."

An honors student, Christian said he believes his lack of sleep interferes with his academic performance.

"I'm real tired all the time,'' said Christian, who attends seminary class at 6 a.m. "It makes me inattentive sometimes and takes longer for me to do things I would otherwise do instantaneously."

Curriden said the push for later start times is independent of the early morning class schedules offered locally by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"This isn't a seminary issue," Curriden said. "There are plenty of kids who are in magnet programs or take early-bird classes who have to get up incredibly early. They could all use better quality sleep."

School Board President Ruth Johnson said she was approached several years ago by church leaders who questioned the early start times. But that campaign evaporated after churches surveyed members and discovered students and parents actually preferred the early morning seminary sessions, Johnson said.

"Leading the list of suggested alternatives is switching the high school schedule with either the elementary or middle schools, or pushing all of the start times back by 30 minutes.

School Board Vice President Sheila Moulton said she has concerns about moving the elementary school start times to later in the morning. Thousands of students are already dropped off at campuses as early as 7 a.m. for Safe Key, a city-sponsored program that provides supervised activities before and after school.

"For students to have 2 1/2 hours before they hit the classroom I would have a real problem with that," Moulton said. "It could turn into a very long day for some of our youngsters."

A 1999 survey by the National Sleep Foundation for 60 percent of American children under 18 complained of being tired during the day, and 15 percent said they had fallen asleep at school during the previous year.

Curriden is a member of a new Clark County group known as Start Later for Educational Excellence Proposal in Nevada, or SLEEP. The organization hopes to work with the district to "think outside the box," Curriden said.

One answer may be changing parents' perceptions of public transportation specifically CAT buses as unsafe, she said. In a survey of families in November, the majority of parents said they would not want their children to go to school on a public bus. And an attempt by the district to use CAT buses for students at Rancho and Valley high schools in 2003 was canceled amid parental protests.

"We shouldn't throw the idea out," Curriden said. "It seems silly to me if we have a CAT bus that runs down Charleston to Town Center Drive to have a school bus follow the same route."

In the Phoenix Union High School District, which serves 24,000 students at 14 campuses in the Arizona metropolis, transportation is almost exclusively on the public bus line.

The district spends $650,000 a year providing passes to high school students who qualify for free and reduced price meals and live at least 1 1/2 miles from campus. Other students buy passes for $17 a month.

With 80 percent of its students qualifying for the meal program, the district has found the majority of the teenagers are experienced public transit passengers long before they reach high school.

"Most of our kids, and in some cases, their parents, have been riding the buses for years," said Craig Pletenik, spokesman for the Phoenix Union High School District. "They've learned how to be self-sufficient, make transfers and keep to a schedule."

The high school locations align with the city bus routes, Pletenik said. However, a new campus opening in 2007 won't be immediately accessible by public transportation and the district will likely have to provide bus services to the 800 freshmen and sophomores who open the school.

Rulffes said the Clark County School District already provides students with tokens for CAT buses to help them take part in extracurricular programs that occur outside of the regular bus schedules. District and CAT officials have had "many, many discussions" about ways to better use the public transit buses, he said.

"It depends on what's feasible,'' Rulffes said. "CAT buses tend to follow arterials and don't go into neighborhoods. Also, when the buses are full they tend to keep going (past scheduled stops). That would be an issue for us."

Johnson, who has four daughters three of whom are in high school said she's interested in hearing from parents. But she also notes that families must help out by ensuring that children go to bed early enough.

Changing school start times at the high schools isn't a magic bullet, Johnson said.

"The idea that our test scores are going to skyrocket or our dropout rate is going to change drastically as a result of this isn't realistic," Johnson said. "It's still going to have to be coupled with parents taking an active role and understanding that students need sleep and supervision to make sure they make good choices."

The School Board's meeting will begin at 4 p.m. Thursday at the Greer Education Center, 2832 E. Flamingo Road. The regular School Board meeting will follow at 5:30 p.m.

Emily Richmond can be reached at 259-8829 or at [email protected].