Everyone can agree that waking up to our loud and annoying alarm in the morning is the worst part of the day. This dreadful noise is what gets us up in the morning for school. But are we fully awake at 7:30 a.m.?

Students are expected to come prepared each morning to participate and learn in class. It is almost impossible to perform these tasks while we aren’t running on enough energy to get us through the day. When school starts early in the morning, students show up half asleep to each class and sometimes even sleep during class. Waking up early makes us lose crucial hours of needed sleep.

If schools started just a bit later each morning it would make a big difference in our overall performance throughout the day. Students would be more actively participating, grades would rise, and attendance would go up.

Sophomore, Isaac Rushing said, “School should start later because I’ll get more sleep and be able to be more productive in class.”

Of course there’s always some debate. Yes, a later school schedule would interfere with after school activities and events, but wouldn’t that be worth the adjustment? If schools really want their students to succeed, they should think about how the students can engagingly be proactively learning. This would include having more time for students to sleep in.

Starting school later would be more realistic and reasonable. Teenagers can’t learn their best daily while they’re half asleep. It’s time for schools to realize this problem and to start seeing sleep as a basic need. It’s not that the students are acting lazy each morning, it’s that our school schedules don’t line up with how our bodies work.

Sometimes the best way to get students to wake up is to let them get a better sleep each night.