Update from May 6 Meeting

Welcome:
Superintendent Dr. Jeanette Cowherd thanked the parents, teachers and administrators for giving their time to help with this work.
- How do start times affect sleep?
- How does sleep affect school?
- How do different start times affect after-school activities?
- How do different start times affect school programming?
- What are important scientific and logistical considerations for start times for elementary, middle and high school?
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Deliverables:
The group will provide findings to the Bus Driver and Start Times committee, with the answers to the questions listed under “purpose.”
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Activities:
The group will review and summarize research to find the answers to the questions, and it will identify the logistical impact of various start times.
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Scope:
The group will try to deal only in facts, rather than opinions, and it will not provide judgements or value-based recommendations.
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Sleep Research:
This group reviewed a meta-analysis of many research studies. The research had appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.
From this first review of the data, the group found that this analysis showed a great deal of research attempting to tie the amount of sleep to success in school, but it was not reliable or conclusive. However, they said there was reliable data that shows a clear change in natural sleep cycles when children become teenagers, and they found a correlation between later start times for teenagers and reduced traffic accidents, as well as improved mental health.
In the coming weeks, this group plans to find more peer-reviewed journal articles to read together in order to get more data.
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Elementary, Middle-School and High-School Logistics:
These three groups brainstormed how a variety of different start and end times would affect schools, students and families at their grade levels. Then they started reading through all the comments that came in from parents, staff and students through the recent start times survey, to help them identify every possible impact of each start-time scenario.
In the coming weeks, they will reach out to others to help them identify any effects they might have missed, and they will gather data to help prove their findings.
