1. Subject: Should School Start Later
2. Audience: School Students
3. Purpose: To inform the audience why school should start later and persuade them to join my side (perhaps even taking action in their own school)
4. Speaker: A student who lives in Massachusetts

Ladies and gentlemen, as students, I’m positive that you’ve all, at one point, struggled with getting out of bed to go to school, possibly oversleeping and missing the bus. As a high school student myself who has attended school since pre-K, I’m very much aware of this as I’ve been through the same. We get up as early as, let’s say, 6:30 am to catch a bus that always seems to come at a snail’s pace just to spend six tiring hours at school, only to come home to more excruciating work that seems to last a lifetime. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if school just started an hour later? Not only would it give us more time to sleep, but it would also lead to improvements in mood and focus. According to a recent survey conducted by sleep experts and health professionals in Massachusetts public schools with a start time of 8:30 to 9 am, 80 to 86 percent of all students agreed that they felt much happier and less sleepy in class, being able to concentrate more on top of that. These experts even took a look at the overall grades of students and saw that many who initially had grades in the 80s became grades in the 90s unlike last year when start time was still around 7 to 7:45 am. I, myself, go to a school in Massachusetts and I can confidently say that I’m in the same shoes.

Now early start times in school, as all of us know, can lead to sleep deprivation. The downside to that is that it can lead to numerous health problems like increased anxiety and stress. Given that we basically do work for the majority of our week, even the weekends, it’s only natural. However, according to the National Health Department, studies have shown that stress and anxiety is correlated to depression, fatigue, obesity, and suicidal thoughts. This will not only harm our lives personally, but academically too. Our future is important and we are the future. We need to make sure that we, the students, are being given the best choices made by our schools and later start times are apart of that.

Danny Chen Pd 9