The time had come for the Ladue School Board of Education to act on the selection of bell times and length of day for all the buildings in the district.
District personnel need the time to put together bus routes for the 2013-14 school year. A new fifth-grade center will be coming on-line in August.
Three questions had to be answered
- Will all building official bell times (other than the Ladue Early Childhood Center) be six hours and fifty minutes in duration.
- Will the new Fifth Grade Center be placed on the same tier as the High School.
- Will the high school or middle school open first each school day.
The board resolved by a vote of 5-1 to keep the option that already exists. Board member Ken Smith was the only one to vote nay.
Surveys showed that 71 percent of the high school students wanted the same school hours they already have: 7:40 a.m. to 2:20 p.m.
Former educator/board member Jeff Kopolow proposed a radical change. Knowing it would not pass, he suggested moving the high school school day to a 9:30 a.m. start. “What most high school students need is more sleep,” he said.
Smith believed the board should decide what is best for all the students. Surveys show that high school students should start later, and middle school earlier. Smith wanted to flip-flop starting times. (Middle School currently starts at 8:10 a.m.)
“We should give the students what they really need (more time to sleep) not what they want. Students are resilient and would quickly adapt to change,” said Smith.
The prevailing view of the board was this is not the year for radical change in light of getting a new superintendent and opening a new school. (The fifth Grade Center).
The current bell schedule with high school opening first and elementary schools last will remain in place.
More on this topic and security issues Wednesday on Patch.com.
The only thing adolescents need (a modern concept that didn't exist until the early to mid-20th century, BTW), is a set amount of sleep, roughly 8-9 hours. If you need to get up at 7 AM, work back from there. It's called parenting, as in "Go to bed, lights out, electronics off!" There is no natural inclination on the part of teenagers to stay up until midnight - which was darn near impossible until the invention of cheap artificial lighting. Before then our day was by and large dictated by the sun - it got up, so did you. Let's not confuse a need for sleeping a given number of hours with any inclination to sleep past sunrise. We only do that because we now allow ourselves and our teenagers to stay up way past our natural bedtimes.
Toddlers actually are closer to the natural sleep pattern. They need 10 hours, we put them to bed at 8, they get up a 6, 10 hours later, and conveniently enough, sunrise. Toddlers and younger children are not clock driven, the rest of us are. If you type in "natural sleep cycle" on Google, you'll find multiple references to the fact that since we evolved near the equator, where you have 12 hour night and day patterns continually, our natural sleep cycle is actually bedtime two hours after dusk, four hours of sleep, two hours of wakefulness, four more hours of sleep, rise at sunrise. That actually makes sense, although the two hour period in the middle is actually a surprise. But 8 hours total, tied to the sun, perfectly logical. Starting high school at 9:30 AM would just be accommodating bad behavior, not to mention a ton of unintended consequences. It's like trying to get a free lunch.
It's going to be difficult, if not impossible, to show an evolutionary reason why, especially in winter, that human teenagers would want to stay up 6 or 7 hours past sundown. Although I hate the term, it's an "artificial construct" of modern society, not a natural sleep pattern. There comes a point where one hour more of sleep gains you more than one hour more of studying or extracurricular activities. Do less, sleep more, get more done.