The majority wants a change but it still doesn't happen

This morning I left Secondary at 8:25 and arrived at Elementary at 8:35. Ten minutes!
And still people claim that between 8 and 9 you can't cross the Selendar bridge. That's what they believe and they don't care if you prove otherwise.

On the Harvard Business School website I read the following:

How do you deal with people who have no desire to change?

I don’t.

Have you ever tried to change the behavior of an adult who had absolutely no interest in changing? How much luck did you have with your attempts at this ‘religious conversion’? Have you ever tried to change the behavior of a spouse, partner or parent who had no interest in changing? How did that work out for you?

My guess is that you have tried and have been consistently unsuccessful. You may have even alienated the person you were trying to enlighten.

If they do not care, do not waste your time.

Well maybe I am wasting my time. The polls show that the majority of people want a change, so why did we get stuck at this point? Why can't we just give it a try for a week or so?

The unfinished dreams

Monday mornings are the worst, don't you think? After a relaxing weeking the alarm clock starts nagging us again. For me it always rings in the middle of a dream. Today I was just checking my e-mail and then it woke me up. I'm afraid I'll never find out what people are e-mailing me about in my dreams..
There must be a reason why we are dreaming (some say it is to re-organize the brain), so it can't be good that we don't finish these dreams. Well, although it may be a reason for me to change the school hours, it is not the most important one.
What surprises me is that the people that disagree with changing the hours have all sorts of reasons not to change (like traffic or the fact that dad's work starts early too) but nobody seems to disagree with the scientific evidence that if the school would start later, our kids would perform better. And shouldn't that be the most important reason???

Breaking the "bad traffic" myth

Today is Friday. I left the gate at the IST Secondary School campus at 7:58.
I drove into the Elementary school at 8:09. That's 11 minutes. So what's true of all those claims that you can't get to Elementary school after 7:30?

I will continue measuring for the next couple of weeks. I will also report the weather and road conditions. Today it was not raining and the roads were dry. The police was still controlling the traffic around the Selander bridge on both sides of the bridge.

Update:
Monday 14-04-08. Left Secondary at 08:00 arrived Elementary 08:13. Dry conditions.
Tuesday 15-04-08. Left Secondary at 08:00 arrived Elementary 08:16. Dry conditions.
Wednesday 16-04-08. Left Secondary at 07:58 arrived Elementary 08:17. Heavy rains.
Thursday 17-04-08. Left Secondary at 07:50 arrived Elementary 08:06. Rain.
(I must say the traffic police is doing a great job getting traffic across the Selander bridge these days)

Schoolbuses against global warming.

Here at IST nobody is carpooling. Why? Because we have to get up too early and we don't want to loose another 5 or 10 minutes of sleep to pick up other kids.

Many of the IST children are taken to school in a big 4x4 car (Landrover/Landcruiser etc.). These cars have a CO2 emission of 500gr per kilometer while a 40-50 seater bus has an emission of 800gr per kilometer. In many cases the children are dropped of at school and the parent drives back home, doubling the distance driven, making the bus mor economical than the car, even if it had only one passenger. If we manage to fill the bus with 40 kids that otherwise would have been alone in a car, we can reduce the carbon emission on the trip between secondary school and elementary school by 97.5%.

And it not only would save the environment, it would also save you money!
Does anyone out there realize the distance between the two campuses over the road is exactly 6 kilometers! (I've just measured it). And does anyone realize that the running cost of your 4x4 car is around $1 per kilometer.So if all the parents that have children in elementary school and live on the peninsula could just drop of their child at the Secondary school, they would save the roundtrip worth $12.
If we would hire a luxury Coach to take let's say 40 children from Secondary school to elementary school it would cost approx. $40 per trip, or $1 per child. This means the parent that drive a round trip would save $11.
With the new school times I would propose to have 2 buses to start with.
One bus would leave from let's say the BP station on Ocean road at 7:30 and one bus would leave elementary school at the same time, both to arrive well in time for the 8:00 start at Secondary School.
At 8:00 the same buses would leave from Secondary School to Elementary to be there well before 8:30
By shuttling approx. 80 children around in each direction we would reduce the number of car trips over the selendar bridge by at least 100 in each direction. That is a lot of cars!

Board Open Forum

The presentation at yesterday's Board Open Forum went really well. There was a lot of support from other parents and many of them were happy that the issue was finally brought up again.

From what I heard from other parents it is important to allow our students to attend the lessons at their native language school (Dutch, German, Japanese, etc) or religious classes. Most of these seem to start at 15:00 so ideally IST finishing time should be 14:30.

Most people that I talked to think that starting Secondary School at 08:00 and Elementary at 08:30 would work best. Ideally we should have a school bus run between Secondary and Elementary so that parents who have children on both campuses and live north of Selander Bridge only have to drop their children at Secondary. (We have about 100 families with children on both campuses. I'm not sure how many live north of the bridge).

Everyone agrees that a healthy lunch is important. One parent mentioned to me a while ago that we could ask an outside caterer to offer a lunch box service. The lunch boxes can be delivered at school just before lunchbreak, an excellent idea I think. Adam Fuller straight away mentioned that the Holiday Inn may be an option.

Any comments? Please feel free to add comments to our posts by clicking the link "comments" at the bottom of each post.

A day in the life of an IST student

It’s six in the morning and still dark outside. No sensible person would consider waking up and in fact nobody would if it wasn’t for the alarm clock.

We all know that young children have a perfect biological clock. They normally sleep when they are tired and wake up when they are fully rested.

But not the IST kid. They wake up because an angry parent shouts “come out of your bed, I've called you fifteen times now!”

With the eyes half closed you sit down on the breakfast table. There is toast, cereal, tea, but the only thing you can force down your throat is a glass of Ribena.

It’s 6:35 now. Dad is already in the car with the engine running. There is great fear for the Selendar bridge traffic jam. If you are 5 minutes late to leave the house you may be 30 minutes late in school. Why is that? Well, because stupid enough all schools start at the same time and especially traffic around Al Muntazir school on the UN road cause to block that road so badly that everything comes to a grinding halt.

Around 8:00 you start feeling your empty stomach so you quickly finish the snacks that you brought to school, leaving nothing for later.

At one a clock you feel you should have lunch, but you don’t. It is the hottest time of the day and yes: these silly grown-ups want you to play soccer or any other outdoor activity. Who plans this?

Then around three you get home and eat lunch. As you are starving you may eat 5 pancakes or 8 slices of bread.

And at 6 (yes, I guess the smart reader has worked out that this is 3 hours after lunch) you have dinner…

Unfortunately most parents don’t understand that these irregular eating habits are not very healthy and even in last years AGM questions were raised about the large number of overweight kids in our school. Any idea why….

After dinner the parents really start getting nervous. Did you do your homework? No you can’t watch TV. They want to have you in bed by 8 because tomorrow the day starts ridiculously early again…

The parents are frustrated too. They would love to have a social life during the week. Go out for dinner or have some friends over. Or even maybe go out for a drink (the Irish pub seems to be nice), but they don’t. Because they have to get up at 6 (or some of the moms with a complicated make-up job even at 5) so they want to go to bed at 9 too.

And why? School starts at 6 because it gets hot in the classrooms.

Uh, wait a minute. That was 20 years ago when there were no A/C’s in the classrooms. Today we have these nice split A/C units and I would rather be in a classroom at 2 than outside in the hot sun running around on a football field.

So why doesn’t the school change its timetable?

Just shift everything 2 hours:

• No kid would have problems waking up
• at 9 there is no traffic at the selendar bridge
• kids would enjoy a healthy breakfast
• they would also have lunch and dinner at normal times developing healthy eating habits again
• the after school activities would take place at times that the sun is not strong anymore
• kids would be able to do their homework after dinner and still have some time to watch TV
• parents would be able to have a social live again

And for the European and South African parents the time gap would be closed. There is only one hour difference between here and SA and continental Europe in summer, but because our timetable is wrong by 2 hours, in reality the difference is 3 hours. So very time you have visited home, it takes 2 weeks to adjust to that time difference again.

We are chronically sleep deprived.

taken from: the U.S. National Library of Medicine

Bonnet MH, Arand DL.

Dayton Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Wright State University, Ohio, USA.

Data from recent laboratory studies indicate that nocturnal sleep periods reduced by as little as 1.3 to 1.5 hours for 1 night result in reduction of daytime alertness by as much as 32% as measured by the Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT). Other data document that 1) 17%-57% of normal young adults have MSLT latencies of < or =" 5.5" or =" 50%"> or = 10 minutes and 2) 28%-29% of young adults reported normally sleeping < or = 6.5 hours on each weeknight. More extensive reduction of daily sleep amount is seen in nightshift workers. A minimum of 2%-4% of middle-aged adults have hypersomnolence associated with sleep apnea. Together, these data show that significant sleep loss exists in one-third or more of normal adults, that the effects are large and replicable and that similar effects can be produced in just 1 night in the laboratory. In light of the magnitude of this sleep debt, it is not surprising that fatigue is a factor in 57% of accidents leading to the death of a truck driver and in 10% of fatal car accidents and results in costs of up to 56 billion dollars per year. A recent sleep extension study suggests that the average underlying sleep tendency in young adults is about 8.5 hours per night. By comparison, the average reported sleep length of 7.2-7.4 hours is deficient, and common sleep lengths of < or = 6.5 hours can be disastrous. We must recognize the alertness function of sleep and the increasing consequences of sleepiness with the same vigor that we have come to recognize the societal impact of alcohol.

School Start Times Debate

A Look at the School Start Times Debate
(taken from the Website of the National Sleep Foundation)

"Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," said Ben Franklin. But does this adage apply to teenagers?

Research in the 1990s found that later sleep and wake patterns among adolescents are biologically determined; the natural tendency for teenagers is to stay up late at night and wake up later in the morning. This research indicates that school bells that ring as early as 7:00 a.m. in many parts of the country stand in stark contrast with adolescents' sleep patterns and needs.

Evidence suggests that teenagers are indeed seriously sleep deprived. A recent poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) found that 60% of children under the age of 18 complained of being tired during the day, according to their parents, and 15% said they fell asleep at school during the year.

On April 2, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), introduced a congressional resolution to encourage schools and school districts to reconsider early morning start times to be more in sync with teens' biological makeup. House Congressional Resolution 135 or the "ZZZ's to A’s" Act would encourage individual schools and school districts all over the country to move school start times to no earlier than 8:30 a.m.

"I hope this is a wake up call to school districts and parents all over this country," said Lofgren. "With early school start times, some before 7:00 a.m., adolescents are not getting enough sleep.

"Over time, sleep deprivation leads to serious consequences for academic achievement, social behavior, and the health and safety of our nation's youth," the Congresswoman added. "We must encourage schools to push back their start times to at least 8:30 a.m. — a schedule more in tune with adolescents' biological sleep and wake patterns and more closely resembling the adult work day."

In fact, public opinion seems to side with Lofgren's "Zzz's to A's" resolution. According to the National Sleep Foundation's 2002 Sleep in America poll, 80% of respondents said high schools should start no earlier than 8:00 a.m. each day; nearly one-half of these respondents (47%) said start times should be between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. Only 17% of those polled said high school classes should begin before 8:00 a.m.

A study by Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom at the University of Minnesota, demonstrates the impact of pushing back school start times. After the Minneapolis Public School District changed the starting times of seven high schools from 7:15 a.m. to 8:40 a.m., Dr. Wahlstrom investigated the impact of later start times on student performance, and the results are encouraging. Dr. Wahlstrom found that students benefited by obtaining five or more extra hours of sleep per week.

She also found improvement in attendance and enrollment rates, increased daytime alertness, and decreased student-reported depression. Many experts agree that adolescents require 81/2 to 91/4 hours of sleep each night, however, few actually get that much sleep.

Even with compelling research, changing school start times can be challenging for school districts. Administrators have to delay busing schedules. Coaches worry about scheduling practices and many parents rely on the current start times for reasons such as childcare or carpools.

Students are concerned that being in school later in the day means that it will cut into after-school jobs and other extracurricular activities. Still, there are convincing reasons to push back school start times. Mary Carskadon, PhD, a renowned expert on adolescent sleep, cites several advantages for teens to get the sleep they need:

• less likelihood of experiencing depressed moods;
• reduced likelihood for tardiness;
• reduced absenteeism;
• better grades;
• reduced risk of fall asleep car crashes; and
• reduced risk of metabolic and nutritional deficits associated with insufficient sleep, including obesity.

Dr. Carskadon is Director of the Chronobiology/Sleep Research Laboratory at

Bradley Hospital in East Providence, R.I., and Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Brown University School of Medicine. She is a member of NSF's Sleep and Teens Task Force. With the resumption of school classes in the fall, start times are likely to remain a hot topic. Thus far, individual schools or districts in 19 states have pushed back their start times, and more than 100 school districts in an additional 17 states are considering delaying their start times.

"Changing school start times is not the only step needed," says Dr. Carskadon. She also advocates reducing weekend sleep lag (staying up later). "It's important to add sleep to the school curriculum at all grade levels and make sleep a positive priority."

For more information on the school start times issue, see Adolescent Sleep Needs and Patterns: Research Report and Resource Guide, available from NSF.

Later start times for high school students

The following article was taken from the website of the University of Minnesota

Later start times for high school students

Since 1996, Kyla Wahlstrom and her research team at the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) have led the way in the study of later start times for high school students, beginning with their study of the impact of later start times on educational achievement in two different districts.

Two Minneapolis-area school districts decided to shift secondary school start times to 8:30 a.m. or later based on emerging medical research showing adolescents have a natural sleep pattern that leads to a late-to-bed, late-to-rise cycle. Medical researchers found this cycle is part of the maturation of the endocrine system. From the onset of puberty until late teen years, the brain chemical melatonin, which is responsible for sleepiness, is secreted from approximately 11 p.m. until approximately 8 a.m., nine hours later. This secretion is based on human circadian rhythms and is rather fixed. In other words, typical youth are not able to fall asleep much before 11 p.m. and their brains will remain in sleep mode until about 8 a.m., regardless of what time they go to bed.

How sleep impacts education

These adolescent sleep patterns can have profound consequences for education. With classes in most high schools in the United States starting at around 7:15 a.m., high school students tend to rise at about 5:45 or 6 a.m. in order to get ready and catch the bus. It’s no wonder that 20 percent of students sleep during their first two hours of school, when their brains and bodies are still in a biological sleep mode. The loss of adequate sleep each night also results in a “sleep debt” for most teens. Teens who are sleep-deprived or functioning with a sleep debt are shown to be more likely to experience symptoms such as depression, difficulty relating to peers and parents, and are more likely to use alcohol and other drugs.

What the research shows

Data collected from the two Minneapolis-area school district—Edina, a suburban district who changed their high school start time from 7:20 to 8:30, and the Minneapolis Public Schools, who changed their start time from 7:15 to 8:40—provided Wahlstrom and her colleagues information regarding the work, sleep, and school habits of over 7,000 secondary students, over 3,000 teachers, and interview data from over 750 parents about their preferences and beliefs about the starting time of school.

The study has laid the groundwork for similar changes in other school districts, supplying concrete results of putting the research into practice.

For example, initially Edina parents were concerned about the effect of later starts on such logistical issues as busing, athletics, and child care for younger students. But at the end of the first year of implementation, 92 percent of respondents on a survey for Edina high school parents indicated that they preferred the later start times.

Additional data from the study done in Minneapolis schools showed that there was a significant reduction in school dropout rates, less depression, and students reported earning higher grades.

This research has had a major impact nationally. Wahlstrom receives numerous inquiries on a daily basis from teachers, superintendents, parents, and school nurses from every state in the nation requesting more information about the findings of their research and how they can use that research to change policies in their districts.

What others say about the School Start Time Study

According to Pat Britz, program director for the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C., “The study has been vital to our efforts in educating school districts and leaders who are pursuing changing their school start times. It represents the research school officials, parents, teachers, and other interested parties use to support their advocacy efforts. It is the only long-range systematic study that shows that changing to later start times is beneficial to students and schools. We receive calls on a regular basis and have maintained a database of schools considering this change. As part of our package of materials we send out, we always include the CAREI study and also refer people to the Web site. It has been used in numerous presentations, studies, and discussions.”

Carol Johnson, superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools, says, “The Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement led by Dr. Kyla Wahlstrom is a wonderful example of how the research community can effectively partner with school districts to demonstrate how specific practices contribute to attendance, engagement, and ultimately, student performance. We have received feedback from many families and staff affirming our decision to use this data to reorganize school times, and the data has resulted in many other districts in the state and around the country changing start times to better match students’ learning rhythms with the school’s instructional program.”

Marilyn Conner, administrative consultant to the Mesa County Valley School District 51 in Grand Junction, Colo., points to the research done at the University of Minnesota as pivotal in the decision to change school start times in that district. “As the executive director for middle schools from 1996–2000, and again as the assistant superintendent from 2000–December 2001, I found the CAREI report extremely useful. This report was the basis for the investigation by the Mesa County Valley School District Board of Education to begin to alter arrival times in our schools. Our school district will continue to utilize this report and its results.”

Why this research matters

The School Start Time Study effectively reveals that high school students can benefit from later school start times. While the concept that teenagers have a distinctly different sleep pattern was first recognized by medical research findings, it is only through examination of actual cases where these findings were used as a basis to change school policies that educators can understand the ramifications of making such a change. The case studies done by Wahlstrom and her colleagues provide research-based information for school districts across the United States who are now seeking to make informed decisions for their own communities.

June 2002