Do you find yourself struggling to wake up in the morning? Maybe falling asleep in your classes? Well you’re not alone. An average students’ day will include school (7:45- 2:45), Sports or clubs (3:00- 6:00) and homework, causing many late nights which means less sleep. The amount of sleep adolescents get can affect their performance in school and impact their grades. Many schools around the US have acknowledged this problem and pushed back their start times to 9 or 10, unfortunately, Cheyenne has not made a change.  

One of the main reasons they haven’t changed the high school and middle school times is because it would interfere with the bus schedule. A way to fix this problem would be to make elementary students start school earlier (in elementary, many students don’t do extra-curricular activities so they’re able to get more sleep) and push back the high school and middle school start time. This method would get rid of any problems with the bus schedule. 

As for the times that school starts, high school and middle school should start between 9 and 10 am and elementary should start an hour before. This timing would give students at least two more hours to sleep. Starting school later would push back the time that school and the extra-curricular activities end. 

The problems might continue, or it might not affect students in the way the current schedule does. We would never truly know if a new schedule would work better or worse than our current schedule.