Sleep deprivation among teenagers is an epidemic.

Starting the 2016-2017 school year, the Bellevue District School Board has decided that the high schools will be starting at 8:30 a.m. In the Seattle School District, high schools will start at 8:45 a.m. Some elementary schools will be starting as late as 9:45 a.m. Was this a smart decision or should it have been more thoroughly thought through?

Currently, high school students in the Bellevue and Seattle school districts are not getting enough sleep. Their workloads seem to be never-ending and on top of that they have extracurricular activities and other commitments.

The University of Michigan conducted a study over two decades and the results showed that there were declines in nightly sleep in teens of all ages across the United States.

Now I know that there are some advantages to starting school later, but the disadvantages are something that cannot be ignored.

A contributing factor to the problem with sleep deprivation is not that school start times now are too early, it’s that there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all that needs to be done. As of now, teenagers are already going to bed at midnight or later. Changing school start times will not change anything and in fact it will make things worse.

Therefore, we need to keep school start times the same, or perhaps earlier, and make other decisions, such as changing the work load given out, decreasing the amount of classes and controlling the distraction of technology for better classroom learning environments. There are more effective alternatives to help the increasing amount of sleep-deprived teens.

If school start times were pushed back later in the day, it would have a huge impact on the household. In many situations in the greater Seattle area, both parents have to work and if their kids are not leaving the house at the same time they are, then how are they supposed to get to school? Parents will also have to use more daycare since they will need it in the morning and afternoon. Pushing back school start times is just a burden on the family life.

Later start times are also inconvenient because given the same amount of homework as before, and tutorial changed to the morning, teenagers will be kept up later into the night and sleeping hours will be even more skewed because they are getting fewer hours of sleep. Students will end up not going to tutorial because they are so tired and this will lead to poor grades.

I do acknowledge that school start times being pushed back match better with the sleeping routines of teenagers because we get into our deepest hours of sleep in the early hours of the morning. However, it is not realistic to start school later because the amount of homework is not going to change and neither is our “to-do list” that is never-ending in our brain, crammed on a sticky note, or typed away into our phones that beep every 30 seconds.

By pushing back everything in the day by one hour or more, you are asking us to stay up later, not get any more sleep than we are, play sports even later into the night and live an even unhealthier lifestyle. Does this make any sense? Who is making sure the homework load is decreased? No one. Then how are we all supposed to get through the day without falling asleep? The answer is simple. We won’t.

I ask that we think about what is best for the students so they can be prepared for the best future possible. An epidemic can be cured but not every vaccination works. Changing school start times is not the right vaccination.

Shaefer Davis is a 17-year-old senior at Interlake High School in Bellevue.