The Struggle For a Later School Start

In which Dan chats with Terra Ziporyn and Amy Wolfson, authors of the new book Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start. Terra is a medical writer and historian and Amy is child clinical psychologist. They both serve on the board of Start School Later, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing public awareness about the relationship between sleep and school hours. 

Dan, Terra, and Amy discuss the importance of sleep, why evidence is often not enough to change minds, and where we might find the political will to start school later.

As always, I welcome comments and questions on Instagram @_dankearney_

Mentioned in the show:

Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start by Terra Ziporyn and Amy Wolfson
Start School Later
Race to Nowhere, a documentary film from 2010
"California just pushed back school start times — you weren’t dreaming. Now what?" an article from CalMatters

Music: "The Process" by Lakey

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It really comes down to a way of thinking about what priorities are and about assumptions about what is most important. And somehow this issue has not made it as the unquestionable, non-negotiable thing that whatever we do, we don't take away a student's opportunity to sleep. That is not on the radar right now. We would never consider solving all these logistical problems by, you know, depriving kids of healthy food, like serving them poison food or not removing the asbestos because it's inconvenient or costly. We assume it's a higher priority not to do that. And we don't have this is not a priority.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

I'm looking at a map from the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. government clearinghouse for such data. This particular map shows the average high school start time by state, i.e., what time in the morning do teens need to be at school? What would you guess is the earliest average? If you guessed anywhere near 7.30, you're correct. Louisiana leads the nation in early start times with a slew of other states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut with similar early first bells. And those are averages, so there are certainly lots of schools starting well before 7.30. On the other hand, there are many states starting at 8 o'clock or later, such as South Carolina, the nation's latest average starting time, at 8.34. Minnesota and California. California's relatively later start times are the result of a 2019 law signed by Governor Newsom mandating later start times for middle and high schools. And that law was in part due to the efforts of today's guests.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

I'm Tara Zapporin. I am a medical writer and historian, but I am also the um co-founder and executive director of Start School Later, which is a nonprofit dedicated to healthy adolescent sleep and also school start times that give kids a chance to get that.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah, and I'm Amy Wolfson, proud to be co-authors on this book with Tara. It's been a labor of love. We've often said to each other, people ask, how do you collaborate on a book project? And that's been an amazing experience as well. So I'm an academic. I'm a profess I'm a clinical psychologist, child clinical psychologist by training, and I have been really dedicated to child and adolescent, including infants, going all the way back to my graduate school days at Washington University in St. Louis to child and adolescent sleep.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Tara and Amy are the authors of the new book, Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start. As you'll hear me say at the start of our interview, this excellent book is an inconvenient truth. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in education who thinks teens are getting enough sleep. And Amy and Tara's work uses a combination of research and personal stories to lay out the structural barriers, at least from the school side of things, to preventing adolescents from getting enough disease. Two important things about their argument before we get to the interview. First, sleep is not just something it's nice to have, and it shouldn't be treated like any old item on our wellness checklist. Amy and Tara write, quote, sleep plays a foundational role in growth, development, and virtually every aspect of human functioning, including cognition, academics, mood, behavior, mental and physical health, and safety. Second, this is about political will. And that's why I say inconvenient truth, because I don't think any rational leader in education would dispute their argument. But who's got the will to make a change? Amy and Terra lead a nonprofit dedicated to building that political will at the grassroots level, which makes them so much more than researchers and authors. They walk the walk. All right, here's our interview. I've been in education for about 16 years and teaching adolescents and noticing that sleep is a big deal. And one thing I like about the book is that you couch sleep as not just something on the checklist of wellness, but actually something foundational to how we live and function and thrive as humans. I think is how I'd maybe would file it. It reads really well. And I wonder maybe if Tara, we could just start with something really foundational here. What is it about adolescent development that makes sleep so vital?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Sleep is really important, obviously, to every human being at every stage of life, right? It's absolutely foundational to growth, development, and basically every aspect of human function. But we pay attention to it at certain stages. It's particularly, we all pay attention to infant sleep. Everybody's very well aware that that matters. But there's something about adolescence that somehow it has fallen off the cliff of awareness. We sort of dismiss adolescence as this time of um first of all, we don't really like adolescents as a society. We think of them as kind of, you know, ugly, smelly adults who can't quite get their act together. Um they should be able to take care of things. And so the topic of their well-being and their sleep often gets overlooked. But I think Amy can talk to you about the sleep research that shows that actually adolescents need as much, if not more, sleep than their younger counterparts. They also have a different need for it at different times of day, and it plays a particularly strong role in their health, safety, and performance, probably arguably more important, say than younger kids, partly because we adults have less control over their sleep. And there are consequences involved in that. And so it is lost in the discussion, but it is as, if not more important than, say, infant sleep. And I think it would make sense to talk to Amy about why that is, you know, from a research perspective.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Yeah, well, let me just let me just add, because I I, you know, I I would say the other really important piece here, and it's funny, I hadn't really thought about this before. I thought we got impact, you know, from psychos from a psychology standpoint, the idea of adolescence being difficult and challenging was kind of thrown out decades ago. And there was a rethinking about adolescence being this really important stage of development, and we should be supportive and think optimistically and positively. And yet I think in the midst of that, and we don't necessarily talk about this in the book, sleep got ignored, was not part of that conversation. And so sleep and adolescents end up being blamed for and it being viewed as an individual issue that adolescents need to resolve themselves. And I think that speaks to one of your other questions, I believe. Um, the other really important point from a from a research perspective is that developmental psychologists and educators will say this. Anyone who teaches middle school and high school will say, and we know this both from research and experientially, the fundamental stage in development for sort of growth and potential down the line is early adolescence. It's fundamental. Kind of succeeding in middle school, we know has long-term implications that are much more important to think about than even early development. I mean, I don't want to knock as Terry, I mean, we don't want to knock early development, it's also important. It's all important. The point is adding this back in. And so when we think of sleep, the thing that's really fascinating too is although we haven't proven this yet, the changes that occur, both in terms of sleep need or what we call sleep pressure developing slower, meaning as an adolescent goes through the day, they build up this need, this sense of needing to sleep, we call it process S, more slowly than their younger siblings and peers, and more slowly than people who are a little bit older than they are, as well as the clock is delayed. So biologically, literally, the suprachiosmatic nucleus that's in the brain literally shifts to a later time, meaning it's you're not going to fall asleep until later in the evening, and as a result, you're gonna wake up later in the morning. But all of that, it looks like begins early in adolescence, or we know begins early in adolescence. And some researchers are wondering: is it even a marker for it for physiological adolescence? Meaning, is it it might might we see it as that crucial?

SPEAKER_02 9:22

Yeah. And and generally, Amy, what's the age range we're talking about here? The crucial age range when sleep is uh so vital.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Well, I'd say from early adolescence until until the end of high school. So we tend to what what we define as adolescence. So American Academy of Pediatrics and American Psychological Association don't use the exact same range, but generally we're talking about age 10 to age 18. Um American American Academy of Pediatrics will say until age 21, in fact. Um, so it you know it depends on the but that's that's the time frame we're talking about. And you start to see, you do start to see what we call a circadian advance, meaning this the clock moves a little bit in the other direction, varies individually, and there hasn't been a good longitudinal study to show this, but probably around age 20, 21, um, at least from cross-sectional data we know.

SPEAKER_02 10:21

Okay. And Tara, as a society, how long have we known this? How long have we understood this about adolescence and sleep?

SPEAKER_00 10:30

That's one of the really fascinating um realities that you know finally hit us in looking into this topic and it explains a lot of the problem, in fact. We haven't known this before.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

A lot of our work together on this as well.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

There's a real disconnect. We have a whole chapter in our book about the history of this, which is one of the most interesting things for me to dig into this because nobody really has before. Um, it's really ironic that the very years that schools started moving to such early start times, because we really haven't always run our schools this way, that's another myth. But the very same years that the schools started moving early were just the beginnings. I'm talking about the 1970s. We didn't understand a lot of these things that Amy was talking about about sleep, not even adolescent sleep until the 1970s when it really picked up. I mean, there was a little bit of it. Yeah. Um, but but but the adolescent sleep stuff started in the 80s and picked up in the 90s, and that's and and you can almost there's like an inverse correlation between the times high school started and what we knew about how this was hurting kids, but these were different worlds. And this is one of the problems, one of the things I like about these types of discussions is that um we need to have the educators hear from the scientists and vice versa, you know, because they weren't talking to each other. The sleep researchers knew this, but the education policy makers were in it on a different planet. And it's not like they did it cruelly, like we're gonna torture adolescents and deprive them of sleep. They just didn't know that it mattered what time schools started. So you sort of saw this in all of our society where you know, when I grew up, people talked about nine to five all the time, and somehow that morphed into eight to five thirty, and then seven thirty, and now we've got meetings at the Sleep Society starting at seven, you know, but it was unheard of. Um, when I was growing up, my mother said, you know, there's private time before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. And you can wake up and do what you want, but that's not when you go to work or school unless you're in a certain type of job where you're needed. But you know, generally you don't call people on the phone in those hours and do things. TV shut off, stores closed, doesn't happen anymore. We just think we can do things at any old time. And ironically, the sleep research uh showing us that we couldn't do things whenever we wanted was happening while we expanded our hours to everything.

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Sure. Yeah, it's interesting you bring up that disconnect because one thing that I was thinking about reading the book was how we know this from a whole range of areas in American society that evidence alone is not enough to necessarily shift policy. But but what kind of what you described there though is got has me kind of wondering how much of it is that idea that evidence doesn't move people as much as it should, and how much of it was just there just wasn't a connection between the two parties, you know, the scientists, the researchers, and and educators. How much of it was the disconnect, and how much of it was people just aren't moved by compelling evidence?

SPEAKER_00 13:42

I think they both play a role, and this is really up my alley because I spent my career as a science writer and I went into that field thinking, oh, I just need to explain to people in language they can understand what the evidence shows, and then they will change their behavior and they will change their policy accordingly. Well, of course, that was extremely naive. Um, and your choice of the term inconvenient truth is very apropos, because of course, this is a topic that is applicable to many other areas outside of adolescent sleep where we have evidence and we have policy, and they don't hear each other for reasons that don't have a lot to do with the evidence, right? So they both play a role. Um, there is absolutely a trickle-down time where it takes a long time for findings of research to re to reach the policy makers for sure. And there are reasons that they don't want to hear it also. Um, and that is what we have to contend with. Yeah, I I I always like to explain this as we need the evidence, it's absolutely essential, but it's not enough. Nobody changes their policy on the basis of evidence. But if you don't have the evidence, you're gonna have a lot more trouble changing the policy, if that makes sense. So um even when we had the evidence, it wasn't known, but even when it was known, it wasn't gonna be heard until some other things fell into place. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Sorry, I was just gonna I was just gonna add, we we're not, we're not, I mean, I think increasingly, and there are doctoral programs like this, but we're not trained as researchers to think about the kind of public health or public, not even public health, it can be across the board in all kinds of scholarship, the communication piece to outside audiences beyond our sort of ivory tower, so to speak. I mean, I've always been con you know fascinated by it and interested, but I can't say I was ever, you know, actually trained or taught until I did kind of media training after my first book or something like that. So it's not kind of part of what we do as as graduate students at all.

SPEAKER_02 15:48

Sure. And how did you two come to this? What was your path to this research, this topic, and and ultimately the book?

SPEAKER_01 15:56

As you know, as I talk about in the book, um, you know, it was really just fortuitous. I'm not some in the sense of my interest in sleep. I'm not somebody who had poor sleep and then got interested in sleep. Um, it was all about the mentors and people that I met around along the way, mostly women, quite frankly. My mentors in graduate school. I worked with someone who, the late Patricia Lacks, who was uh one of the first insomnia researchers, period, in the country. Um and um then I, you know, I my my early research was picked up by Mary Karskadden and some of her colleagues at Brown, and I was invited to come meet them. I was just about to start at Holy Cross, as I talk about in the book, and we met and kind of one thing led to the next. And it just so happened, though, I think what's most important in in this part of the story, and we talk about it in the book, is that I spent this first what we call tenure track junior research leave in 1994 and 1995 doing research with Mary Karskadden, who wrote the foreword to the book. And it was literally that year that she went, you know, that that that she gave this talk in Minneapolis, St. Paul about her work and kind of, as I say, sort of the rest is history. I won't, I don't know how much you want me to go into it in the podcast, but in many ways it was a relationship that formed, which I think is so much a part of doing good research, particularly in the behavioral sciences and sciences and psychology. It's collaborative, it's rolling up your sleeves, it's talking to each other and then asking and answering the questions. Tara and I met, um, uh, Tara can give the specifics of the story, but um, we met before I ever moved to Baltimore because of her founding of Start School Later. Um, but what's great is that you know I moved to Baltimore in 2014, and so we live very close to each other and started to talk much more about this intersection between public policy, the science, how do we get the word out? I was invited, I served a previous term on the board of Start School later, and we just started forming this relationship, and I kept saying to Tara, I think the two of us are right to do a book on this topic. We need to tell the story from our two vantage points and also how policy and science come together or don't come together, and so on. And this is such a great case study as well. And Tara kept saying, it's the time's not right yet. The time's not right yet. And I'll let you say a little bit more, Tara.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Yeah, I have a lot of ways to answer the the original question in that one. I have a much less straightforward path to this than Amy does because she spent her career as a researcher in this area, and it was logical to go out and advocate for what she found was really true. Although there's some pushback against doing that in the science community sometimes. You're not supposed to. Yeah, in the early days, right. It was terrible. For me, believe me, Dan, I did not intend to be doing what I'm doing now. This is definitely a really um, I could say serendipitous or I could use another word, um, result of a variety of things in my life. I never thought I'd be running a nonprofit or out there spending my life trying to change school start times. Um, the reason that I I think, I mean, you know, one an Aristotelian level of causation, where how far back do you want to go? I I have there were various forces in my life that all came together in this work, but I didn't intend it. Um I I was, as I told you, I have a PhD in the history of science, and it focused on how science reaches the public, about popularization of science. So that's always fascinated me. Then I spent my career bringing science to the public. Um, I'm a co-author of the Harvard Guide to Women's Health and Alternative Medicine for Dummies, and a bunch of other books bringing science to the public, but not particularly sleep. Sleep is one thing, but it wasn't a particular interest or passion, just bringing medicine and science to the public. So I did that. But what really pushed me over the edge into this was raising three children who started high school at 7.17 in the morning. And when I moved to the area where I live and joined the Citizens Advisory Committee, which is, you know, not the PTA, but the uh a policy advisory group in my county in Maryland, this was the number one issue that they were pushing for back in 2000 and 2001, when I first moved here, and my oldest child was going into seventh grade. And I never had, I had written on sleep. I wrote an article for consumer reports on sleep back in the 80s. Um, but and so I knew that sleep mattered, but I wasn't thinking about this so much in terms of sleep, as in terms of obviously this is a terrible thing to do to a family and children. Have you ever lived with an adolescent? Have you ever what who in their right mind would want to drag a teenager out of bed at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to go to school? I had seen kids waiting in the dark for buses. It baffled me because that was not my childhood. Um, obviously, 717 was some arbitrary, bizarre time that had become upon for reasons I could not understand. And the community wanted to change it, and they were even going to do something about it that long ago, and yet it never happened. So I got involved, I was involved in other education advocacy movements, and I learned how to be an advocate. And um, when my youngest was about to graduate from high school, I started a petition, um, and one thing led to another, and um, we ended up with this national organization. And I I found it incredibly compelling, intellectually interesting as well as meaningful personally, because I feel like this is a a difficult, complex topic with all kinds of repercussions beyond what you might imagine. But we actually can do something about it if we Put our heart and soul into it. And those are the kind of causes that I gravitate to. And it's been really fulfilling, but definitely has taken over my life in a way I never would have planned.

SPEAKER_02 22:13

It's such a great story. I do want to talk about start school later. But on the barriers, the you know, the book, you make the point that the barriers to adolescent sleep aren't sort of like immutable, you know, unchangeable. It's it's they're constructions, right? They're we've societies designed them this way. So, Amy, could you maybe start talking us through what are some of the primary barriers that as a society, as an education system, we have put up in front of adolescent sleep?

SPEAKER_01 22:44

I think that number one, people respond immediately to their concerns about transportation. Um, in other words, this assumption that you cannot change bus routes. And I should point out, although we don't talk at length about this in the book, that we're learning more and more that actually increasingly few teenagers use school buses to even get to school. So school districts run buses with empty buses. Um, that's sort of so that's a that's transportation that comes up over and over again. I think the other issue that comes up over and over again is the age of the child. So what you end up happening is parents of younger children who haven't had adolescence yet will be preoccupied about well, what's what's the right time for their younger child, or or they're sort of accustomed to a particular school time that works for them as a family without thinking about what's going to happen down the line when they have an older child. Um, that comes up over and over again. Teachers, um, and again, I not I think part of it's largely politics, but often teachers initially, unless they've had their own personal experience or an experience with sleepy kids in the classroom, they have not quite experienced that for whatever reason or haven't focused on that. Um, often are think about their own personal schedules, so they may be parents themselves and they want to be home earlier, or we know that there have been various historic periods that teachers have been concerned about for good reason, um salaries and have taken second jobs, and so they've wanted school to get out so they can go to their second job, and so on, um, or concerned that not actual truth, but that it will cost too much money to that it'll cost so much money to change school start times that that money would could have been money that would go to their salaries. So there's that issue that comes up around teachers. There are just numerous things that come up that are all obstacles that can be dealt with if we focus in on that. The bottom line is this foundational need for you know sufficient sleep or optimal sleep and school starting at a time that um aligns adolescents' sleep wake schedule and school start times.

SPEAKER_02 25:03

Yeah, I I I could remember I think the bus picked me up at 6 a.m. when I was growing up. I lived in a rural area, so it was like there's this cold convoluted bus route. This bus to this place change buses.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

I mean, it was kind of ridiculous, but yeah, and and we know that some of that um I think there was a period of time in the correct me if I'm wrong, Terry, in the 80s where um into the 90s where you know school districts were growing and expanding in different parts of the country, and people who are sort of further suburbs sort of went got further and further out.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

So it's it traces back to the mid-20th century, but yeah, it there's endless consolidation, and of course we build highways. This is where history is so important, right? All these social and economic factors played into the decision to do this to schools. Um, and it they they had nothing to do with education or kids, they were just societal factors about what we thought we could do. Yeah. So we were definitely shipping kids off forever. And I spent a lot of time in Vermont where I still see a lot of kids going off to rural schools very, very early on long, long routes. And they're, as you know, Amy, they're trying to consolidate the districts, even more so there. And it's a problem, but it really, as we talk about in the book, it really comes down to a way of thinking about what priorities are and about assumptions about what is most important. And somehow this issue has not made it as the unquestionable, non-negotiable thing that whatever we do, we don't take away a student's opportunity to sleep. That is not on the radar right now. We would never consider solving all these logistical problems by um, you know, depriving kids of healthy food, like serving them poison food or not removing the asbestos because it's inconvenient or costly. We assume it's a higher priority not to do that. And we don't have this is not a priority. So, you know, uh everything Amy's saying comes down to the issue we talk about a lot in the book, which is the political will to change, and that rests on various assumptions we make about we can't change, there is no other way to do it, and sleep really isn't that important anyway. So we have to talk about these other factors. But Amy said I would talk a little bit more about, you know, the pushback, which is one of the most fascinating parts of this story, and I think one of the things people don't know as much, and it was certainly eye-opening to me, to realize that when the science first started coming in, and it really was very compelling science, even in the 1990s, it was the school districts that jumped on it. They wanted to make the change. They, the people, there were many, many districts all over the country that internally started looking, and most of it began in Minnesota, but then it spread other places. But um, Mary Carskadden's work in the 90s led superintendents and school boards all over the country to study ways to move their high schools back to the times they had started, say 25 years earlier, before they pushed them all. And they based it on science, just like we were talking about. The problem was that what they soon discovered was that when many of them made these changes, uh the lives of school administrators and decision makers, the school board members became absolute hell because the community came at them with pitchforks about how this change in a school schedule would disrupt lives. And, you know, as we discuss in the book, I I'm very sympathetic to that. I totally understand it because whether you have a kid in school or you teach in a school or you know a kid, public school schedules really do impact virtually every aspect of community life. They touch on everything, and many people are involved in them. And community life is complicated, and child care is complicated, and a work-life balance is complicated, and people are already on edge because we don't have a system that really supports these things. And people are just hanging on by a thread, like I managed to get my kid to school and pick them up and get them to this and that, and and suddenly you suggest changing it. Well, they panic. And if your job as a school board member or a superintendent is to keep your job, why would you alienate these people? So the school people kind of backed out. And there were sporadic uprisings by parents and sleep researchers over the years trying to get them to change, but they knew pretty well that if they wanted to have a peaceful life um and keep their jobs, that they would try to avoid messing with school schedules. I have heard more and more former superintendents tell me this and tell me in private that they just wish they'd mandate the change from on high because then they wouldn't have to take the fallout. Um, but they know it's best.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

One thing we see here, certainly in Los Angeles, and I'm sure that's this is true all over, but students are so over-scheduled after school. And now you have this compounding factor that they're up later and later and later, and they're still getting up early in the morning to get to school. And so it's there that limited sleep time is being crunched even further as they're you know getting home from the activities nine, ten at night.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Absolutely true, which is a really good point. And that is, you know, even if we move school star times later, it's not the be-all and end all solution. There are other reasons that kids are having their sleep cut into, and nobody is denying that at all. The point simply being that if you keep school start times this early, they are not going to get healthy sleep, regardless. It doesn't matter how many activities you cut out, it doesn't matter how many screens you take away, they cannot get healthy sleep if you're forcing them to get up at five or six in the morning every single day, the vast majority of adolescents. But those other things are problems. I mean, Race to Nowhere, which obviously talked about all these issues, was a big proponent of later school start times, amongst other things. And they're absolutely right. And we've spoken at a lot of their community events, you know. Um, but we think it's this is just a fundamental structural change that has to happen. And it's the only one, by the way, where there is actual evidence that it not only can be done, but when it is done, it actually does make a difference on a population like that.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

It's theoretical. Yeah. And then the myth I think you were interested in, miss, and and that they don't stay up later. They gain the sleep largely from the time getting up later in the morning, because that's an assumption people want to. Oh, you'll make it later, and then adolescents will just stay up even later at night.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

They stay up extremely late, regardless of what you do. They just do. I've lived with a lot of them.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

They do. I um I know I have a I have a uh 14-year-old and a 12-year-old myself, and I know that uh they're capable of it.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

It becomes increasingly a struggle, but the but the pressure to excel at school definitely is compounded. And you know, as they get into their junior and senior year in high school, in particular, especially the high flyers that are talked about in Race to Nowhere, the ones who decide they're going to play that game, it's it's brutal. And they have to choose between succeeding in school and their health, and that isn't right.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

I really appreciate the holistic view that you take in the book and and in this conversation that it is bigger than the individual parts. And sometimes in schools, we just constantly, you know, major in the minors and we're fixated on the tree and never see the forest. But then we had this we had this uh international experiment we all went through called COVID. And in the book, you write about some lessons we learned about adolescent sleep through the pandemic. Uh, Tara, do you want to kind of start and uh talk through what did what did COVID tell us?

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Well, for me, the biggest lesson from COVID was how amazingly quickly and easily we could make a major systemic change overnight when we wanted to or had to. All the things we were told just couldn't be done were just done, right? We stopped having in-person class. We went to virtual schooling. Not saying all of this is good, and Amy will talk about that, but we can do things when we want to do things. So things we thought were impossible suddenly become possible. And that was the biggest lesson for me from COVID. Amy has some actual data about other things, but for me, that's a really important lesson about the we can't do it, which is the biggest obstacle we face. It's just this would be nice to do, but it's too hard, it's too expensive, it's too complicated. No, if something's important, we can do it.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Well, including, that's a good segue, including so many schools related to the policy issue, had virtual schools start later.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

How interesting. You know, very few of them, if any, started at seven in the morning. Nobody was getting up at six, nobody would even think that they would start at that.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

Get on their computers to put make sure they're 10th graders on the computer doing Zoom school. So, yeah, I mean, I was part of a research team, but there are now quite a number of studies. I just reviewed another study from Brazil on the on the topic. Um, so one of the one of the first lessons that was learned from research is that when you not surprising, this is kind of a duh, of course, because it confirmed other research, that when you have virtual school start at a reasonable, reasonable hour after 8:30 in the morning, and often it was later than that, consistently, meaning for the kids who had virtual school every day of the week, those kids had more regular sleep wake schedules and got more sleep, and they like that from a sleep perspective. However, for kids who, once we moved to choices and districts doing hybrid or simultaneously doing you know, other districts at the same time having some kind of quasi-hybrid or changing the schedule during the week, that irregularity was highly problematic. So those kids did not benefit. They had irregular sleepwake schedules and in some studies got less sleep than previously. Um, so not so it's not surprising from what we understand about sleep. Regularity, consistent sleepwake schedules within 60 to 90 minutes, as well as getting the optimal amount of sleep, are both important. It's not one or the other. What we also learned, and I think is really important to keep in mind, you know, related to all of this though, is we would not be recommending delayed virtual school for the rest of our lives throughout the United States or anywhere, because virtual school, whether it was consistent or hybrid, had secondary negative consequences for mental health and for kind of school performance. So that's not the solution. The solution is we need later school start times, but kids being in school at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 35:55

Did any schools, any districts use that to move, shift the window a bit, you know, to say, well, you know, you said the lack of political will, and here it forced people to change. Did any school districts stick with it?

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Yeah, many of them did, in fact. Um, many of them, and we we list some of them in the book, they they the superintendent said, This is my opportunity. Everybody's so discombobulated anyway, that when we come back, we're gonna start at the time we've been working on for the past 15 years, trying to convince the community to do. So, yes, I'm not saying it happened as much as it should have, but there were definitely uh quite a number of districts that did shift later. Or they came up with with very creative approaches, like um, I know one school in in Pennsylvania, for example, they decided they'd have like an option to do virtual schooling first thing in the morning for the first hour. And then so the students could come in later if they wanted to. I don't know how that worked with the busing, but it's really worked well for them. You know, it depends on the demographics of the town. So the students could be in a virtual class or they could make up the work later. They just realized that there was a lot more um flexibility in the way you could run schools than they had ever imagined. And I think we really get into a mindset when we've been in one town or one district that whatever we do is the best way and the only way to do things. And kids are sometimes the absolute worst examples of that kind of thinking because they've never known anything different. They don't have any basis of comparison. So COVID basically showed we can do things differently, and yes, it that opportunity was seized upon, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

So, short of an international health emergency, um, what are ways that we can create political will? And you outlined some in the book, but maybe we could talk through your organization, start school later, the work you've done. And I love the local government approach, the local aspect approach. We some often in this country we get so wrapped up in national politics and national, but it's so much of our lives are dictated at the local political level. How can we create political will?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

As we say in the book, that's the million-dollar question. I wish I knew, but I have observed, and again, history, very useful here. Look at other social reform movements. Always has been multi-pronged, multifaceted efforts by a variety of people. It has not been simply the scientists coming down and saying, make a change, go to the national level. Um, I think women's suffrage is a really good example for it of a place where there was local, regional, state, and national. We didn't really know how it would ultimately be resolved. But basically, you've got to get people from a variety of sectors to understand that it's in their interest to do this. And the way that you do that is through a variety of approaches. We don't know all the answers, but what I've observed and what I've learned from history is that you can't just say, um, you know, we're gonna go have uh a constitutional amendment on start times and that'll take care of it. That is not the answer. You have to work person by person from the bottom up, but you also have to work from the top down. Um, so we work on policy statements from major organizations, but we also talk at local elementary schools, right? Out there with volunteers, um, talking about sleep, talking about the benefits of later start times, trying to make people understand there are other ways to do things. We we have to meet, and we have to do this more. We have to meet with all the stakeholder groups to get them to understand that this is in their interest. And it's not always about sleep for all of them, right? For teachers, it might be about, they might care about sleep if they understand it, but they also need to understand that this is good for their family lives, for their ability to teach students, for attendance, um, for graduation rates and things that they or the other school personnel might care about. You have to make people understand in the community that having sleep-deprived teenagers driving around all day might not be good for road safety. And um, so you have to work with all these different organizations. And and so it's it really is I I just always use the term multi-pronged, multifaceted. We've got to, and this is what we do at Start School later. We have local chapters, we have state chapters, we go into DC and meet with legislators, we talk at n with national agencies, we run workshops, we talk at local schools, and this has all been paying off but very slowly. And in I mean, it but it really just comes down to are the people making the decisions going to benefit from this? How do we make it in their interest to make a change? And just keep keeping that at the forefront of our mind instead of we're right, this is the science, you should do it. And I think that's very, very hard for people. You know, Amy's a true academic, but I'm trained as an academic, come from that background. We're all trained to think, oh, we're right, you should just do it. But that does not work. It's about making it in people's interest to make the right change.

SPEAKER_02 40:56

And and Amy, how do you how is are the arguments by start school later and in your research, how is it received when you meet with people at those local levels, whether it's parents or school board, a superintendent, what kind of reaction do you get? What kind of conversations are you having?

SPEAKER_01 41:17

I I I mean, I do think that that in general, the sleep feel, the word has gotten out in a way that's different than 10 to 15 years ago. So I do think that people hear the science and the foundational, we started the conversation off the foundational importance of sleep differently now than they did decades ago. I do think we've made progress in that regard. Because of podcasts like yourself and media coverage, extensive media coverage, social media, um, increasingly uh sleep being not nearly enough, but being part of a high school biology class and so on. So I do think that that that's slowly changing, not changing enough. Museum exhibits, Tara and I both uh just learned about a colleague of ours in Texas at Baylor, who you know has been doing incredible um science museum exhibits and getting people into the public. So I think that has changed a bit, um, I have to say. Um, I do think um, not because of anything I've done, but because of start school later, influencing researchers are focusing on health. Health seems to be a key area that gets people concerned, mental health and physical health, more so than school behaviors or school performance. So talk learning how to tell the story and what people are going to respond positively to it. Um but at the end of the day, there's still major struggles. There's still major struggles, you know, superintendents and principals that don't even want to have the conversation, partially, as Tara was talking about earlier, because of their political concern about whether they really want to jump into this. But again, I I would say in all the even though it's slow, and hence the title of the book, educating the exhausted, the exhausted adolescents and the exhausted researchers, activists, historians, community members, parents, um, we're in a very different place than we were only 10 years ago, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

And so for if a principal or a superintendent listening right now who maybe has some of the political will, but is not sure where to start, other than of course making your book the next book in their book club. That's that's 100%. But what but Tara, what's like what's a good starting point for school leadership that that wants to seriously take this on, but maybe, you know, as you've noted, it's not just a simple fix. It's not one thing or two things, it's a lot of things. So where do we start?

SPEAKER_00 43:52

There are lots of what lots of things that can help these school leaders. One of the things we find that is most helpful is that they love to hear from others. School leaders who've done this. So we've started running workshops where we have some of the superintendents and principals who've done this talk to their colleagues about what were the real issues, how do we resolve them, how did we deal with the pushback from the community? Because actually, one of the things we've learned is that when there is leadership from the within the school system, this change, there's a lot less pushback. Because as you, I'm sure you've experienced as a teacher, the school systems have to make large systemic changes fairly often, and there are ways to do it right and there are ways to do it wrong. But one wrong way to do it is to be lukewarm about it and say, ah, we have to do this, they're forcing us to do this. It's, you know, it's going to mess up our lives. Instead of saying, this is going to help the kids, this is going to help the community, here's the research. And when when superintendents and principals hear from other leaders, they always say this to us. They'll say, This is what we did. So they need to talk to other leaders or, you know, definitely come to us because we can connect them to those people or come to one of our workshops or seminars. Also, there's some really interesting legislation that's going on, like in Maine, and you know, the California Bill is our most prominent success story where there was a guardrail set for how early schools can begin, and that's a whole other conversation. But Maine recently passed legislation where the Department of Education was given some money to give grants to school systems that wanted to do this. And they've actually given out the first grant to Augusta Maine. Again, it's not going to go to a district that doesn't have the political will, at least among the leadership, but that money can help them build the will in the community because there are ways to build community will. We know some of those things. The school community's will can be bet can be built by following other principles we've found, like engaging, authentically engaging with the stakeholders about what their concerns are, creative problem solving about some of the logistical challenges that are going to come with any change, right? Um, like what are we gonna do about daycare? What are we gonna do about the kids whose parents have to go to work early? These are solvable problems, but you do have to facilitate that. So they can learn from that. The community engagement, the raising awareness and reminding the community about why you're doing this. Why are we inconveniencing you? And by the way, you know, there's you're we're harming our kids by not changing. Let me show you. So they can avail themselves of these resources with this kind of legislation. So so if the I would like to see the the organizations that support the school staff to support this kind of legislation because they do need this help. There is help, there are resources, but they're not hearing about it, they're not availing themselves of it about how to get this done. Like we do know. And you know, San Francisco, when they had to change start times because of the California law, they reached out to several researchers who had um learned from this and as well as their own mistakes. And by engaging the whole community and using algorithms, they came up with a way to, you know, to comply with the California law, but also turned out they save five million dollars a year annually in transportation costs, and the community was great with it, but they learned, they connected with people around the country who had done this. So when there's a well, there's a way, there are resources, we know how to do it. Um, but you have to want to do it. And hopefully, right.

SPEAKER_01 47:25

And the other interesting the other interesting example from years ago is Seattle, where they they spent year, you know, several years educating the entire community, because in essence, we care about sleep for everybody. Sleep health, you know. I I do some other work with regarding sleep in the juvenile justice system in Maryland and in DC. And one of the big concerns we have is not just for those those youth who are in these systems, but for the staff who are taking care of them. And that's true for teachers as well. So teachers, teachers' sleep is valued as well. And so I think that communities that have paid attention to that, there's impact, greater impact when you think of the whole community.

SPEAKER_02 48:06

The book is educating the exhausted adolescent sleep and the struggle for a later school start. Amy and Tara, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me. Great book. Yeah, there's a lot, there's so many education books out there, and so many of them overlap and end up sort of being a bit redundant. Here's one that's not not many books out there about uh the importance of sleep and what that means to our kids and our students. And uh, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 48:34

It was our pleasure. Absolutely.