A national survey this year on the sleep patterns of adolescents (ages 11-17) by the National Sleep Foundation shows that most do not get the optimal amount of sleep for top performance and good health. Now some schools in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County are taking cognizance and making variations in school schedules to help kids get more sleep.
Here are some of the highlights of the survey:
- Just one in five gets the optimal nine hours of sleep on school nights.
- Sleep deprivation increases as adolescents get older. Sixth-graders get an average of 8.4 hours of sleep on school nights, and 12th graders get 6.9 hours.
- Over the course of a week, high-school seniors miss 11.7 hours of sleep.
- More than one-quarter (28 percent) of high-school students fall asleep in school, 22 percent fall asleep doing homework, and 14 percent arrive late or miss school because they overslept.
- More than one quarter (28 percent) of adolescents say they're too tired to exercise.
Why are America's teens so sleep-deprived?
When children reach adolescence, their internal clocks, or circadian rhythms, change so that they naturally fall asleep later at night and wake later in the morning, according to the NSF.
More than half (54 percent) of high-school seniors go to bed at 11 p.m. or later on school nights, according to the NSF survey. Yet most still get up at 6:30 a.m. to get to school on time, according to the survey.
Four years ago the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools moved the start time for high schools from 7:45 a.m. to 8:50 a.m. so students could sleep later in the morning.
It seems to be working.
"We have analyzed it very extensively," said Marty Ward, the system's program-evaluation manager. "We have surveyed all the students in our high schools every spring for the last four years, and we have found that they are sleeping a little more, 34 minutes, a night."
"What research has shown is that the students don't change the time they go to sleep when you change things like what time school starts," Ward said. "But they will sleep as long as they can in the mornings."
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