Our guest blogger, Phyllis Payne, MPH, is the Co-Founder of SLEEP (Start Later for Excellence in Education Proposal) & Implementation Director at the national nonprofit, Start School Later.
Are you hoping for later middle school start times for your own or other children in Fairfax?
If yes, we need your help now. Please sign this petition to urge the school board and Superintendent Reid to prioritize this change to benefit the health, well-being, safety, and performance of our children.
The planned timeline has hit a wall. A year ago, I thought this board would be voting on a change to middle school start times for Fairfax this month (January 2025) for implementation in the fall of 2025. That’s what the FCPS timeline calls for.
Not only has the Board not had a public discussion of which of the 5 options presented on December 3rd is best for Fairfax, it is stuck on the question of whether to implement new bell schedules concurrently with boundary changes. We know from prior experience that FCPS has announced bell time changes as late as May, but best practice usually means that decisions must be made by March for smooth implementation, so it feels to me as if the decision to wait 8 weeks for further input from staff is a decision to delay yet another year at least. The Request for Proposal issued in January 2023 called for implementation in the 2024-2025 school year, but FCPS didn’t contract with any vendors until August 2023 — a delay that already cost students a year of healthier schedules.
To do nothing is to continue to do harm. I would like to hear this board and Dr. Reid reiterate FCPS’ commitment to changing middle school start times while keeping healthy scheduling for all of our students with a definitive plan and timeline for implementation in fall of 2025.
What I would have liked to say, if I had more than 2 minutes:
SLEEP in Fairfax has been advocating for healthy school schedules for Fairfax County children since 2004. FCPS has struggled to meet the biologically-driven scheduling needs of our children and today, you have several options, including 2 that start middle and high schools after 8:30 a.m. as recommended by the nation’s pediatricians.
You have an opportunity to fulfill the dreams of parents, students, and staff in our school district. Stick with your original plans to implement next fall.
It’s harmful to interrupt a child’s sleep cycle in the early morning hours – depriving them of the rest they need to grow and thrive. To delay is to continue to do harm.
You’ve had the options since December 3rd and, yet, instead of discussing which of the options might be our Goldilocks Solution, we’re waiting to compare how the operationalization will differ if we change bells before or concurrently with boundary changes. It will be 8 weeks of delay to consider that question, which may mean a whole additional year or another decade, and, every day, some students and families are suffering with a schedule that literally cuts off their sleep and dreaming before it’s appropriate for them to wake.
Sleep is foundational to almost everything we are doing as a school district. At Start School Later’s National Conference this year, Dr. Mark Bedell, Anne Arundel’s superintendent bragged about attendance rates increasing. He noted, the big push back was concern about high schoolers not being available to pick up elementary siblings from school. There was a burden that parents put on the high schools.
Superintendent Bedell shared the good news, “Guess what? Everybody. We don’t have any problems. … Our attendance rates over the last two years have increased. …When we have a system designed in the best interests of adults first rather than doing what’s right by children, then, we do a lot of harm, and our school board made a conscious decision that we weren’t going to make decisions to satisfy an adult-centered agenda.”
He added, “Two years of data has shown significant promise that this was a good move, both on Federal and State level accountability measures—almost every single one of them is a net plus.”
His biggest smile came as he shared that he’s won more state championship titles in the two years since the change than in all six years in his previous position.
I’ve heard from more than one school leader that changing start times one of the best things they’ve done! Students feel better and are more awake and alert for school.
FCPS shifted high schools from 7:20-8:10. The evidence base now includes positive outcomes from our students including significant improvements in mood and safe driving. More of our high schoolers eat breakfast. We left middle schoolers behind with a promise of improvements, which have been delayed long enough.
In the words of one of our students, “Please do it by next year, I feel like a walking carcass.”
The data bears her out and reminds us of the urgency of making this change. A recent review article on middle school start times and young adolescent sleep concluded that "...after an increase in opportunity for sleep due to a later SST shift, all students improved in negative affect, which included less fear, hostility, guilt, and sadness." and, "Late SSTs improved mood-related concerns, including self-reported depression and anxiety. Kim et al found that students who experienced a delay in SST reported lower depressive symptoms and perceived stress, and students reported less engagement in behavioral and verbal aggressive actions at the 12-month follow-up."
Further, if we want our children to be awake and ready to learn, the authors note, "Improvements in sleep and alertness may be a mechanism to promote engagement in school, such that students may be less likely to nap at school or doze off during instruction." (Barlan, et.al, 2022)
If you know any families with children who suffer from depression and suicidality, you know, there is NOTHING more important to a parent than providing an environment in which our teens actually want to LIVE. Providing a later morning school schedule can have just that impact. I continue to be motivated by the student who wrote, “I work from 9 to midnight cleaning office buildings with my father and pray for later start times every day.”
Please lead us to success on this transformational change--align bell times with adolescent body clocks to help our teens thrive. The outcomes are overwhelmingly positive. Delay harms too many. You have the power to prevent suffering. Families, teachers, and parents are counting on you. Thank you!
Other comments from Fairfax students include:
“Almost everyone I know tells me they are tired on a daily basis.” We don’t ask our children to fast during the week and binge eat on the weekend. We need to stop expecting them to sleep that way."
“I have been struggling every day since the first day of school, even though I have been going to bed at 8:00. I have been forgetting things and not being able to focus."
“Every day, I feel like a mess waking up … My mind is so much more clouded compared to elementary school…if the school board decides not to do anything about it, then teachers shouldn’t tell students not to fall asleep in class…”
“Many of my friends don’t want to take after school clubs because they are tired.”
Data from the Fairfax County Youth Survey (2023) :
In Fairfax, about
1 in 4 eighth graders reported feeling so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that they stopped doing some usual activities.
More than 3 in 20 eighth graders reported that they felt stressed defined as "a situation in which a person feels tense, restless, nervous, anxious, or is unable to sleep at night because their mind is troubled" (within the last 30 days) either "most of the time" or "all of the time." Only about 1 in 3 answered "none of the time."
Please take action now! Sign, and share the petition - on social media, in your neighborhood groups, with your PTA - everywhere you can to get the word out that Middle School Start Times are being derailed. Find more research and take more actions with our advocacy toolkit here.
