Just a couple of weeks ago, Seattle Public Schools passed a measure saying that as of next year, school is going to start later. In response to this, it’s easy for us Pumas to say: “Why can’t we start later?” or “I want to sleep in!” But, it’s important to realize a couple of points before we start storming the castle asking for a later start time.

First of all, starting school later doesn’t come without a price. Starting school later also means ending school later. If we were to start school at 9 a.m. (which sounds nice), you have to remember that we won’t be done with school until 4 p.m! As far as I’m concerned, starting school a bit earlier is a small price to pay for the daylight hours we get after school.

Imagine a day where everything we do is delayed by an hour. Getting home is delayed by an hour, starting homework is delayed by an hour, sports are delayed by an hour and eating food is probably going to be delayed by an hour too.

Plus…if everything is delayed an hour, then odds are you aren’t going to go to bed until one hour later. For example, I go to bed by 11 p.m and I’m up around 7 p.m the next morning. That equates to a solid eight hours.

Now, if everything were to be delayed an hour, then I wouldn’t go to bed until midnight. Although I wouldn’t need to be up until 8 a.m, I wouldn’t have gained any sleep compared to what I normally get. I still get 8 hours, I just would fall asleep an hour later and get up and hour later. Meaning in the long-run, the only thing that starting school an hour would bring is just doing everything else in the day an hour later than I usually do.

Sure, the idea of starting school sounds appealing. And though we all may think that we are going to get an extra hour of sleep (or whatever we would want to do in that extra hour) I bet that we all are still going to be rushing out of the house in the morning because we went to bed too late the previous night.

By: Mahir Piyarali