California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Sunday mandating public middle and high schools in California to push back their start times.
Under the new law, classes for high schools and those that are a part of charter schools, will be asked to start after 8:30 a.m. Classes for middle schools can start after 8 a.m. Some early classes will still be allowed, though.
July 1, 2022, will be the deadline for schools to adopt this law.
In a Facebook post on Sunday, State Sen. Anthony Portantino, who wrote the bill, praised the news.
“Our children’s health and welfare win!!! Thank you Governor Newsom for signing SB 328 to push high school and middle school start time time later in the morning,” he said. “This will have a tremendous benefit to student health and academic performance.”
The change comes amid worries of sleep deprivation among adolescents, according to The New York Times, and is intended to improve attendance rates and reduce tardiness.
“Everybody is looking for a magic bullet with education, one that cuts across all demographics, all ethnicities and that actually has a positive, measurable increase in test scores, attendance and graduation rates without costing money,” Portantino said. “And this is it.”
Students and sleep experts alike have applauded the move
Dr. Sumit Bhargava, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford University, noted that adolescents’ brains are still developing and that chronic sleep deprivation can increase the risk of diseases later on in life.
“When you give them the gift of increased sleep time, it is the biggest bang for buck that you can think about,” he said.
Meanwhile, critics of the bill have argued that a change in school start times will affect students’ commutes and drop-off times.
“While it may be easy for some families with flexible schedules to adjust, in some communities, parents who are working just to make ends meet don’t have the luxury of delaying the start of their workday,” superintendent Al Mijares said in an opinion piece on Oct. 4.
In a statement made by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2014, insufficient sleep for adolescents was called a “public health issue.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association recommend high schools begin at 8:30 a.m. or later, to ensure that students arrive at a reasonable time. According to a 2014 report from the CDC, about 90% of high schools and 80% of middle schools in the U.S. start before 8:30 a.m.
However, just telling teenagers to go to bed earlier so that they avoid sleep deprivation isn’t effective, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, as teens become sleepy later in the night and need to sleep later in the morning, which is because of changes in their biological rhythms,
Adolescents who don’t get enough sleep are at an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and car accidents, according to CNN. They’re could also engage in self-harm and suffer from suicidal thoughts.