The start of the school day is forcing children to ignore their regular sleep pattern, according to Dr. Terra Ziporyn Snider. In response to this, she was inspired to co-found Start School Later, a nonprofit focused on mending the relationship between school start hours and healthy sleep.
For the past seven years, Snider’s organization has advocated changing the time that public schools start the day. They believe starting school before 8:30 a.m. does not allow teens an adequate amount of sleep. Snider says this can cause significant, long-term effects on teens’ health, and can negatively impact blood glucose regulation, blood pressure, reaction time, and the ability to learn.
Snider, who received her PhD in the history of science and medicine from the University of Chicago, was a freelance health science writer before becoming an activist. She is the author of several books, and a former associate editor of Journal of the American Medical Association.
The Severna Park resident had three children attend county schools. She remembered her first Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) meeting in 2002. “When I came in the first day,” the 60-year-old Snider recalls, “the person who was the chair of the CAC said our number-one priority is the school start times. So, I figured by the time my daughter got to high school, it would be all taken care of because everybody believed it was the right thing to do.”
Snider notes that around this time, research was beginning to show that sleep patterns change during puberty, and contribute to excessive sleepiness in adolescents. In response to this, a pilot program, supported by then-principal Joyce Smith and Superintendent Carol S. Parham, was developed in 2000 to start Annapolis High School at 9 a.m. rather than 7:17 a.m., according to an article in The Baltimore Sun.
Unfortunately, due to budgetary constraints, the pilot program was dropped. “It’s now 2019. They have moved the bell times to 7:30 rather than 7:17, which is still far too early, but my daughter is now 31 and has two children of her own,” Snider says.
Snider, who was campaigning the issue in Patch articles online, was beginning to understand how complicated public school politics were. After years of almost no results, she began to give up. “By the time my son was in high school, we started looking at private schools,” Snider explains.
But Snider’s luck began to change when a petition she started through the Obama Administration’s Online Petition Portal in 2011 began to attract national attention. Unfortunately, Snider failed to gain the necessary number of signatures to get a response from the White House. “They just obliterated the petition,” Snider says. “All that work seemed just for nothing. Except that on the very same day that my petition disappeared, I started getting calls from the national media saying, ‘Tell us about this petition.’”
As it turns out, Snider’s Patch articles had gained some traction, and she suddenly discovered she was not trying to make a difference alone. “Reporters called me up,” she says, “and on top of that, I started getting calls from people around the country who were doing the same thing I was. I realized that what was happening in our county was not unique. It was a much deeper problem.”
Snider, on the verge of retreat, was then approached by a Patch freelancer with the idea of starting an organization. “Let’s start another petition and just keep this going,” Snider was told.
Today, Start School Later has grown from five people sitting around a kitchen table into a national 501 (c)(3) nonprofit. They have 130 chapters all over the country, and legislation has been introduced in 14 states on the issue. “Two bills passed in Maryland,” Snider says. “Right here, because of our work.”
And this legislation has proven measurable differences. “We’re now seeing that when schools move later, kids are in better moods,” Snider says. “They have fewer signs of depression, fewer suicidal thoughts, are less likely to abuse substances, [there are fewer] road accidents, attendance rates go up, tardiness goes down, truancy goes down, graduation rates go up.”
What has been most exciting for Snider, however, is uniting different people from around the country who have been struggling with the same issue. “If you’re working on this issue all alone, it’s hard,” Snider says. “We’ve brought all these people together. All working kind of in isolation in their own worlds on this cause, but they are all united in this organization now, and it’s making a huge difference.”
Snider is proud to have given them a national platform, a community, and the ability to be heard.
“You know, it is an example of that Margaret Mead quote that’s so famous,” she says. “‘A small group of concerned citizens can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.’ We really feel that.”
For more information on Start School Later, visit startschoollater.net
