Youth health is a bipartisan issue, experts say. Learn how later school start times and out-of-school programs may reduce student misconduct after school. (Read Part I here.)
Photo credit: Mish_El/Bigstock
When reporting on student misconduct and efforts to reduce it, we as reporters must also understand the challenges facing after-school program providers in addition to those facing communities considering adopting developmentally appropriate school start times.
I reviewed the contribution of insufficient sleep to adolescent delinquency and the harmful impact of long commutes on student sleep time in Part I of this two-part series for the Education Writers Association.
In this final part, I go in-depth on the barriers to after-school programs, including why communities need to address after-school activities when considering later school start times.
Additionally, I detail burgeoning efforts to mandate healthy school start times via legislation, a topic that warrants frequent progress reports for readers on both action and inaction by state legislators. I wrap up by describing a free, comprehensive, classroom-tested curriculum to help students adopt healthy sleep habits, developed by an education researcher.
Plus, get tips from experts cited in the report to help you explore school start times, after-school programs, juvenile justice issues, and legislative efforts in your community and state. Resources for further reading are also included.
Structured after-school and out-of-school programs typically provide a safe environment where adults with expertise in various areas strive to foster students’ skills in art, music, and sports, as well as academic and vocational subjects. They also aim to enhance social-emotional skills and encourage healthy behaviors.
While many schools and communities offer a wide array of after-school and out-of school programs, not all students have access to these programs. Some students also have after-school jobs, educator Stephanie Flores-Koulish, a professor and program director of Curriculum and Instruction for Social Justice at Loyola University Maryland and a co-author of the Abell report, noted in an interview. Some have to pick up younger siblings from schools or day care centers and supervise their activities, she added. Those with long commutes home may not want to extend their school day further. (When writing about this topic, reporters may want to investigate systemic issues that affect access to after-school and out-of-school programs in their communities and then examine what students are doing instead after school.)
After-school programming is not the exclusive responsibility of schools, Flores-Koulish pointed out. “Youth organizations, public libraries, community centers, and recreation centers are among places that offer such programs and do a great job,” she said.
Some states also offer support to community schools for enrichment opportunities and transportation services, she added. Some provide wrap-around programs that enable schools to serve as community hubs that offer not only after-school activities but also meals, health care and other services.
Students who live in rural areas may have no way to get home from school-based after-school programs; schools in rural areas rarely run activity buses. Boosting participation by children from rural areas in after-school programs requires creative problem-solving, Darlynn Rojo-Wissar, lead author of the Abell report, said in an interview. A researcher who focuses on early life adversity, sleep, rhythms, and mental health, Rojo-Wissar is an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.
Advocacy and building awareness of the need for and benefits of such programs can help bring in resources. Parents, school officials, and other community members, working together, often can find ways to address barriers, Rojo-Wissar suggested. “They know the barriers because they are experiencing the barriers, she said. “They know their communities, and they know what types of solutions might work best for them.”
Structured after-school time and later school start times both may help keep students safe, engaged and out of trouble.
In July, the Trump administration announced it was withholding over $6 billion for after-school and summer programs. “Those hours between after school and 6 o’clock really are the hours in the day when students are at the most risk for things that may not produce great outcomes,” Janie Browning, who directs an after-school program serving more than 1,200 low-income students attending Alabama’s Gadsden City Schools, told The Associated Press. “It would be devastating if we lost the lifeline of afterschool for our students and our families,” Browning said.
But similar to the barriers affecting access to out-of-school programs, communities face many challenges to implementing later school start times.
While hundreds of U.S. public high schools have adopted later start times, they comprise only a small fraction of the nation’s nearly 25,000 public high schools.
“Waiting for local municipalities to delay school start times one by one,” Wolfson said, “will disenfranchise school districts that don’t have the wherewithal, organization, or parents who have time to get involved in working with their local school board to bring about change.”
Statewide legislation is the most effective way to equitably serve students, she said. “Even in our complicated political world, youth health remains a bipartisan issue in most states,” Wolfson asserted, one that both citizens and legislators view as important.
Pursuing statewide legislation, of course, requires legislators willing to sponsor and advocate for their bill, and advocates willing to testify on the bill’s behalf, lobby other legislators, and perform the behind-the-scenes work necessary to move legislation forward, a process that often takes several years.
In Pennsylvania, as one example, the state Senate unanimously passed a resolution directing the Joint State Government Commission to appoint a committee that included parents, sleep specialists, pediatricians, school nurses, educators, transportation experts, and students to review start time issues. Its report, “Sleep Deprivation in Adolescents: The Case for Delaying Secondary School Start Times,” was published in 2019. According to that report, most of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts started classes between 7:30 a.m. and 7:59 a.m. Nearly 20% of them started between 7 a.m. and 7:29 a.m. Only eight schools started classes at 8:30 a.m. or later.
Today, about 45 of the state’s 500 public and private schools have adopted later school start times, said Amy Goldman, a parent and leader of a Pennsylvania Start School Later chapter. Development of legislation calling for developmentally appropriate secondary school start times statewide is in process, she added.
Start School Later provides a round-up of pending and passed school start time legislation on its website. California currently is the only state that mandates public high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later. Proposed legislation in New Jersey and Oregon calls for public high schools to start classes no earlier than 8:30 a.m.
While similar proposed statewide legislation in Maryland died in committee this year, advocates are pushing for its reintroduction next year. Two of Maryland’s largest school districts have adopted healthier high school start times: 8:30 a.m. for Anne Arundel County and 8 a.m. for Howard County.
Florida adopted a law in 2023 mandating an 8:30 a.m. high school start time that was scheduled to start in the 2026-27 school year. Florida legislators repealed the law in 2025, citing cost and transportation concerns.
“Without a committed and powerful sponsor, and without a sustained advocacy network or resources to help school districts build community buy-in over the ensuing three-year implementation period, the law was doomed,” Terra Ziporyn Snider, executive director of Start School Later and a co-author of the Abell report, said in her newsletter. Half of Florida’s public high schools start before 7:30 a.m.
Communities considering changing school start times need to address parents’ work schedules, care for younger children before and after school, needs of employers who hire students for after-school jobs, and the timing of multi-school sports events and extracurricular activities, University of Minnesota education researcher Kyla Wahlstrom said in an interview for this report.
They also need to study bus schedules and local traffic patterns. These issues are challenging but manageable, she said. When schools decide to prioritize improving the health and well-being of their students, she asserted, they find ways to adopt healthy start times.
As the longtime director of the University’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, Wahlstrom has studied the impact of later school start times on students, teachers and parents for nearly three decades. Her studies of later school start times started in 1997 when Minneapolis became the first large city to adopt this tactic, shifting the start of classes at seven of its public high schools from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m. She found students’ classroom performance and moods improved.
While later start times give all students the opportunity to get more sleep, students living with poverty, housing instability, and other challenging life situations experience even more dramatic gains from later school start times than their peers, Wahlstrom said.
Schools that make a modest improvement in their start time, delaying from 7:45 a.m. to 8 a.m., for example, she said, experience the same amount of disruption as those who move directly to the recommended 8:30 a.m. start time.
“Starting secondary schools at the latest possible time may be tough the first year,” Wahlstrom said, “but the disruption will fade. Folks then will think the decision was the right one all along.”
Students, teachers, and parents almost invariably report satisfaction with later start times, Wahlstrom said. “Reversals are rare.”
Students benefit from learning about sleep in the classroom, much as they learn about digestion, sight, hearing, and other bodily functions, Wahlstrom said. Most school science and health classes now give sleep short shrift, she maintains. She hopes to change that with an interactive online classroom sleep education curriculum, Sleep to Be a Better You that she and University of Minnesota colleagues Anthony Barnes and Rachel Widome developed and tested in schools in Minnesota and Ohio.
The free program aims to boost student awareness of the benefits of sleep and the costs of not getting enough sleep, help students adopt healthy sleep habits, and teach students ways to address sleep problems, such as insomnia, if they occur, Wahlstrom said.
The curriculum provides six 20-30-minute lessons that regular classroom teachers can present. Materials include teacher scripts and slide decks, videos, student materials, and information for families to help foster healthy sleep habits at home. Teachers can add subtitles in different languages.
The researchers designed the curriculum for use by both middle school and high school students, tailoring discussion topics to different age levels. High school students, for example, spend more time than younger students talking about how texting at night disrupts sleep. They review tactics to help them avoid texting, such as agreeing with friends not to text after 10 p.m. or 11 p.m., parking their phones overnight away from their sleeping space, and using an alarm clock to wake up in the morning.
We hope students will apply the curriculum to their daily lives, Wahlstrom said. “We want students to recognize not only the benefits of sufficient sleep but also their ability to control both the amount and quality of their sleep.”
Learn more in Part I of this series.
Lynne Lamberg is a freelance science writer/editor who focuses on sleep, adolescents, school start times, and mental health. She is a contributor to Psychiatric News and the book editor of the National Association of Science Writers. She also is a member of the advisory board of Start School Later. Follow her on BlueSky @lynnelamberg.bsky.social and X @LynneLamberg.
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