By the time he gets to his morning bowl of Fruit Loops, 15-year-old Alex Brincheiro is awake—sort of. His alarm goes off at 6:30, and it’s never a welcome sound.
“I want to just sleep through it,” Brincherio said.
Like most high school students, he has to get up early to get to school. At Melrose High—where he’s a freshman—school starts at 7:45. His parents expect the battle to get him out the door in time for school will only get worse. Frank and Nancy Brincheiro have been through this before with their oldest son.
“By the time he was a junior and senior it was over minutes in the morning," Nancy Brincheiro recalled. "'Can I have five more minutes?' Even, 'Can I miss first block?'”
“I would tell him you’ve got to go to bed early so you can get up early, and he would say: ‘Dad, I can’t fall asleep. I can’t fall asleep,’” said Frank Brincheiro, who would reply: “That’s nonsense, just do it.”
But the Brincheiros have had a change of heart—they've become advocates in a regional effort to start school later. Frank, a family doctor, believes it’s a public health issue.
“If you start looking at some of the research, it’s almost like smoking,” he said. “Everything’s affected by this.”
Studies link early school start times to chronic sleep deprivation. It not only impacts how kids do in school, but increases their risk of everything from getting into a car crash to suffering from depression. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for starting middle and high schools at 8:30 a.m. or later. The reason: Most teens can’t get to sleep early. Like so much in adolescence, it's hormones that control sleep change.
“Melatonin secretion changes and circadian rhythms shift by about two hours," Frank said. "So when a kid says he can’t fall asleep at 9 or 10 o’clock there’s a biological reason for that. That’s what made me realize, this is just not my kid who’s having trouble. This is something we should address as a community.”
Brincheiro made the case for starting school later to Melrose Superintendent of Schools Cyndy Taymore.
“I said, 'Absolutely,' but there are a lot of considerations,” explained Taymore. “It’s not just simply me [saying] let’s change the time. There’s a domino effect throughout the city.”
Starting high school later would mean sending elementary students to school earlier … impacting bus schedules and family routines. One of the biggest concerns: after school sports. If high school students start later, they get out of later. Their schedules would be out of sync with teams from nearby towns. So Taymore reached out to other communities and asked if they, too, would consider starting school later.
“When I went to the league, there was no question,” said Taymore. “We know the research and they all agreed immediately we should do it as a group.”
Eleven Middlesex League school superintendents—from Wakefield to Winchester, Reading to Arlington—signed a letter supporting a plan to start school no earlier than 8 a.m. by the fall of 2018.
In Melrose, it’s a done deal. The school committee voted to start high school and middle school at 8:15 a.m. beginning next year. Taymore believes other Middlesex League communities will follow suit, but she says it won’t be easy. Communities will have to decide if it’s worth the disruption to sync school schedules with teen sleep cycles, for the promise of an easier start to the day.