Photo Courtesy of Sycamore Advisory Commission

The Sycamore Advisory Commission lays out their proposed timeline if SHS adopted a later start time.

For as long as any Sycamore student or staff member can remember, SHS has started at 7:20 a.m. High school students and staff are up before the sun, starting the school day before their peers in other schools have woken up. With “the [start time being] earliest among Ohio’s top 25 public school districts,” many SHS students get less than the recommended eight hours of sleep. However, that all may be changing.
There are talks of SHS pushing back its start time to prioritize student sleep. The Leaf magazine staff discussed this possibility with Superintendent Chad Lewis, Assistant Superintendent Meghan Lawson, and Director of Communications and Community Relations Jessica Schmidt.
The administrators highlighted how concerns from the community brought the issue of school start times to SHS, and after the initial investigation, they came to learn that chronic sleep deficits—that may be caused by early school starts—can lead to “lower academic performance, attention issues, vehicle accidents, negative mood, suicidality, obesity, and pain.”
Thus, the Sycamore Advisory Commission conducted a deeper research project which provided compelling evidence to move SHS’s start time back to 8 am. The project, appropriately named “Healthier Sycamore Start Times,” is in its beginning stages, but initial presentations have been met with overwhelming community support.If successful, the changes would go into place for the first time for the 27-28 school year. As of now, this plan will not change the start times for any other Sycamore schools.

The community is invited to discuss their feedback with Administration by filling out the form linked in the QR code to the left. If implemented, Sycamore believes that the start time of 8 a.m. will work to reduce the sleep deficit, support healthier learning, and may even lower risk of injuries in athletics.