Teen Sleep Relief
Research showing that adolescents have different sleep requirements than adults has caused some parents in Virginia to call for a later start to the school day. Tracy Smith reports.



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It’s not yet six in the morning, yet 15-year-old Torrey Roicemann is beginning her daily predawn ritual—getting ready for school.

“I’m not a pointy person.”

Barely awake, she chokes down her vitamins and a glass of milk, then off to the bus stop. Torrey’s bus arrives at 6:15 just as the sun is cracking the Virginia sky. By 7:20, she is at Langley High and her first class has begun—French.

For Torrey and thousands of other high school students, it’s a painfully early start.

“Better sleep definitely means better students.”

Sleep specialist Doctor Helene Emsellem says teenagers need between 8.5 and 9.25 hours of sleep per night, almost impossible for a student like Torrey. As we saw, in order to catch her 6:15 bus, Torrey has to be awake by about 5:30 in the morning. In order to get eight and a half hours, she’d have to be asleep by 9:00 pm. Highly unlikely says Doctor Emsellem.

Adolescence chemistry is different than adult chemistry and they’re night owls. According to Doctor Emsellem, children and adults starts secreting the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin about 4:00 in the afternoon, bringing sleepiness on by 9 or 10 at night. In adolescence, melatonin secretion begins hours later, making it difficult for teens to feel sleepy before 11:00pm, or midnight.

“They’re very difficult to wake up in time to get to school in the morning. And all are often functioning at a level that we would be functioning out of we’ve gotten up before a.m..”

But help for Torrey could be on the way.

“Well, I see this as an issue involving our children’s health.”

Sandy Evans and Phyllis Payne, two mums from FairFax County Virginia founded an organization called SLEEP, Start Later for Excellence in Education Proposal. Their goal: to get the high school day moved later.

“Our buses come and interrupt this sleep cycle right in the middle of their sleep cycle.”

They looked at success stories in Minia… and some 80 school districts around the country who’ve pushed back high school start times. FairFax County School COO Dean Tistadt is sympathetic, but he says change is not so simple.

“We have about 17,000 bus-runs a day, so it’s a very intricate, complex system that we operate. And blowing that up and redoing it is, is not something to be done in tributary.”

Changing start times means changing bus schedules, which according to a school board consultant means adding some 200 buses and around 9 million dollars to the system.

“If we could have figured this out, we would have done it already. Because we are not disputing the righteousness of the client, we just, as a practical matter and a operational matter, this is not an easy solution, it’s a costly solution.”

“And we’ve been great if they’ve modeled it with middle school last.”

But even with the additional costs, Sandy and Phyllis believe the community is eager to find the solution.

“We’ve heard of parents driving their kids to the last bus stop just to give their kids 10 more minutes of sleep. The kids and the parents are pretty much just for any relief.”

For the early show Tracy Smith CBS News.

And Harry, you have high schools. And you say the problem is not only at the beginning of the day but also what happens after the school.

Well, there are extracurricular activities, right? And especially with sports, sometimes these kids don’t get home until 7:00 something.

That’s right.

By the time they have something to eat they’re just starting in their homework when according to, you know, science anyway, they should be getting ready to go to bed. (Right) This just doesn’t work.

And a lot of girls suspend like an hour or more getting ready in the morning. So they get up even earlier.

We know about that.

It’s crazy.

I know You have boys. I have girls.

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