Submitted by Jim Healy
I applaud the Republican BET decision to ask the BOE to request an interim appropriation to restore school start times as expressed in their Open Letter in the Greenwich Free Press (Alfano, Arora, Jansen, Cappiali: A Targeted Interim Fix to Preserve High School Start Times May 16, 2025) stating;
“…That’s why we were deeply concerned by the recent BOE vote to alter high school start times, a disruption we believe is unnecessary. Restoring this funding would allow the district to avoid this change and maintain the current schedule.”
I believe this appropriation should be made with the express understanding that the funds are to restore the 8:30am start time. The Republican BET intent is crystal clear in the letter. However, it will be very tempting for the BOE to take the appropriation and, rather than restore start times, reverse the $2mm cuts it made in staff and programming on May 8th. That would be a popular stance among teachers, and some students, but it would be the wrong choice to make, as difficult and painful as this choice is.
It often seems that nobody, except virtually the entire medical community, understands that sleep is foundational to our health and everything we do. You cannot cheat sleep. If you try, you will fail, and the dire consequences are too numerous to list here. This is particularly true for adolescents as they undergo a rapid physical, mental, and emotional development period. Students only go through the developmental stage of adolescence once. There are no re-dos. It is immoral to knowingly sabotage student health during this critical period. The entire medical profession has repeatedly tried to explain this, including Greenwich’s own pediatricians in an Open Letter to the BOE in June 2016 in which they described an 8:30am high school start time as a necessary public health measure.
To be clear, the medical community is saying: “Moving school start times back to 7:45 am or 7:30am is the single most damaging thing the BOE could do to the greatest number of students.” It affects the entire population of high school students. That is why the CDC, and our own pediatricians, described it as a public health issue.
Yet, when push comes to shove in a budget debate, sleep and student health almost always lose. The pain of people getting fired is real, visceral, and highly charged, while the destruction of student physical health and cognition is invisible but nevertheless very real. You can’t see the impairment in brain function, or hormonal dysfunction. But it is there, and it is insidious.
I say this as a person who consistently overlooked the importance of sleep during an intense career – my doctors attribute my unexpected coronary heart disease in part to the effects of the chronic sleep deprivation I imposed on myself. That was my ignorant choice. I urge the BOE not to make the same ignorant choice by imposing chronic sleep deprivation on our students, with potentially long-lasting repercussions.
Some things are Nice-to-Haves and other things are Must-Haves.
Adequate sleep for students is a MUST HAVE. California passed a statewide act to mandate 8:30am start times as a necessary public health measure. It did so because it could not trust high schools to voluntarily do the right thing. New York state recently passed the same law, which will go into effect next year. Both states were afraid that, at crunch time, high schools would adopt early high school start time to fund other “higher priorities,” thereby throwing student health under the bus.
In Greenwich, we should not need a state requirement to do the right thing. If the interim appropriation is made, the BOE should use it as it was intended: to restore funding to preserve the 8:30am start time for high school students next year. Moreover, an 8:30am start time should never be on the chopping block again.
I say all of this as a registered Democrat, but that should have nothing to do with this. Student health, as an underlying right, is not, and should not be, a partisan issue.
The Republican BET said it wanted to extract “efficiencies.” They clearly recognized that rolling back school start time was exactly the wrong way to go about that. Every single day, an earlier start time will make students less healthy and less efficient. It is appalling to me that a school would do this deliberately to students, knowing all that we know now – or should know. It is perverse for a high school to impose early school start times on the same students it is trying to teach. We know chronic sleep deprivation impairs cognitive performance. This has been medically established, but it should also be intuitively obvious. Just go without sleep for a few days and see.
It all boils down to your priorities. To me, preserving student health should be in the basic “Student Bill of Rights.” It is foundational and takes precedence over virtually all other educational priorities. Would you install asbestos in the classrooms to reach a budget target? I don’t think so.
The interim appropriation should be used to preserve an 8:30am high school start time.
It is a MUST HAVE.