The only thing that is possibly better than food is sleep, so why aren’t students getting enough of it? With high school starting at 8:30 AM every day of the week (Monday being the only exception), teens are waking up before their bodies are ready to be up. As Thomas Dekker once said, “Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together” (Page 1). Rest is a contributing component to our body’s health and wellness. Sleep is a very significant factor in determining a person's ability to function well. If students are having to wake up early, that same ability to function well may plummet. If students want to be able to perform at their highest, the start of schools should be moved back one hour from their original starting time.

Getting the right amount of sleep helps children’s bodies to remain healthy. When they aren’t receiving enough sleep, students are increasing their chances of developing high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes. Receiving the right amount of sleep at night helps blood to regulate stress hormones and helps nervous systems to stay healthy. If someone is not receiving enough sleep each night, it could affect his/her body’s ability to do this, which could lead to a high blood pressure. If a student’s bad sleeping habits continue into his/her working adult life, they are four times more likely to suffer from a stroke than adults who have healthy sleeping habits. When lacking in sleep, bodies produce less glucose than they would with the proper amount of sleep, which could lead to type two diabetes. If school districts really want to lessen the amount of sick people in this world, schools should give their students one more hour to sleep in.

In addition to becoming sick, not receiving enough sleep may be have an effect on students’ safety. If someone is accident prone, it could actually be due to the lack of sleep that he/she is getting. Studies have shown that one out of five car accidents are a result of drowsy driving, which is roughly one million car crashes a year. People are more prone to injury when they are tired because exhaustion typically results in clumsiness. When tired, people are more likely to fall or harm themselves due to their inability to pay attention for extended periods of time. If a student was to be seriously injured due to tiredness, he/she would be missing school for a given amount of time. Believe it or not, it actually takes a long time to make up days’ worth of school work for both the student and the teacher. Giving kids more time to sleep in will decrease their chances of injury. 

Not only will kids’ chances of injury decrease, but they will also be able to stay fit. It has been scientifically proven that receiving the right amount of sleep can help to control weight gain. When children have a bad night of sleep, it is less likely that they will exercise or cook themselves a healthy meal that day. When they don’t get enough sleep, their leptin levels drop, making them hungrier than they would be on any other normal day. According to Dictionary.com, “Leptin is a hormone that is thought to suppress appetite and speed up metabolism.” When someone’s leptin values drop, they tend to intake foods that are high in fat and calories. When kids eat these foods, they gain weight, and when they’re tired all of the time, their calorie-intake adds up and they eventually become overweight. If the government really wants childhood obesity to come to an end, they would make a law enforcing the late-start rule.

  Another reason that schools should let their students have longer to sleep, is because sleep is proven to improve memory. While people sleep, their brains refresh and conjoin the events from earlier in that day so that we are able to remember that same information the next day. If people don’t get enough sleep, their brain may not store those events correctly and they could forget everything from that day. When people don’t get enough sleep, their brains may develop false memories, which could lead to failure in school. Harvard did a study where they had volunteers and half of the volunteers napped while the other half stayed awake. Later, they took a test, and the people who napped proved to have forty percent better test results than the people who didn’t nap. Harvard proved that while they were asleep, these student’s brains were able to work and consolidate the problems they were given before going to sleep. As shown by Harvard, if students are given a longer time to sleep, their brains will be able to work more creatively with the information they were given the day before they went to sleep, thus allowing them to do better in school.

By sleeping in later, kids aren’t only improving their memory, but they are also increasing their immunity to illnesses and bettering their mood. Studies shown prove that people who don’t get enough sleep are more prone to get sick after being exposed to a virus, such as a common cold. There are proteins that are released while you are asleep and they help promote sleep. When you are sick, your body has to release as many proteins as it can to help heal the body, and when one doesn’t get enough sleep it could take longer for them to recover from their sickness. For our immune systems to fully recover when we are sick, we must give our bodies the proper amount of rest and relaxation that they need. By giving a student the sleep that he/she needs, a teacher is able to limit the amount of make-up work that he/she has to help the student with.

Along with a great memory comes a fantastic attitude. R. Morgan Griffin gives a persuasive argument of how getting sleep betters someone’s mood, saying,

“Getting enough sleep won't guarantee a sunny disposition. But you have probably noticed that when you're exhausted, you're more likely to be cranky. That's not all. "Not getting enough sleep affects your emotional regulation," says Mindell. "When you're overtired, you're more likely to snap at your boss, or burst into tears, or start laughing uncontrollably" (9 Surprising Reasons to Get More Sleep Page Two #5).

The University of Pennsylvania did a search and found out that subjects who were only allowed to sleep for four and a half hours each night reported to be more stressed, angry, mentally exhausted, and sad.  By sleeping for the correct amount each night, you are able to be emotionally healthy and stable. Having emotionally stable students is good for every school and teacher, because it is easier to educate someone who is confident and able to participate without giving attitude to his/her fellow students and teachers. Happier kids are smarter kids, and that should be what every school wants.

Some people may argue that gaining an hour of sleep will decrease a student’s time in school, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A lot of times while teenagers are in school, the information they are receiving is going in one ear and out the other due to their inability focus because of their sleepiness. By having an extra hour of sleep, students’ attention spans will increase, allowing them to learn more than they do with their current amount of sleep.

Last but not least, it is very common for teenagers to suffer from some kind of sleeping disorder, such as insomnia and sleep apnea. Teens all over the world don’t get enough sleep, and it’s not always because they go to bed late.  A lot of these kids go to bed early, but can’t fall asleep for an hour to an entire night. What are these disorders and what do they mean? Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep even when given the chance. Someone could be dead tired and still unable to fall asleep due to their insomnia. Sleep Apnea is when you have time periods in your sleep where you can’t breathe and it can last from seconds to minutes. To be able to sleep at night, people with Sleep Apnea have to be hooked up to a breathing machine so that they don’t pass away in their sleep. By giving kids that extra hour to sleep in, you are able to provide them with that hour of sleep that they missed due to their sleeping disorder.

Sleep is a very important factor in everybody’s life. Sleep is as important as the water we drink and the air that we breathe. Every day kids all over the world are overly stressed and overwhelmed by even the simplest of things due to their lack of sleep. Teenagers aren’t able to remain healthy, manage their weight or properly process what they learn in school daily. By giving students and extra hour of sleep each night by moving the time that school starts back by one hour, you could be changing their entire life. Every student’s future depends on how well he/she does in high school, why ruin it by depriving them of sleep?