Lower Merion again delays implementing later start times for high school — until 2024

High schoolers in the Lower Merion School District will not get later start times next year after a school board vote Monday — the latest roadblock in a long-running saga in the district around how to get teenagers more sleep.

Despite pleas from parents to follow the science on adolescent sleep needs — and calls that continuing the current 7:30 a.m. high school start would amount to “child abuse” — the board voted 7-2 to wait until 2024 to implement a plan that would push back that time to 8:40, and asked administrators to make some changes.

The shift, originally proposed for fall 2023, would have required middle school to start earlier and elementary school later, to accommodate bus routes — changes that drew pushback, particularly from the elementary school community, where schedules would have shifted from a 9 a.m. start to 9:20, and a 3:35 p.m. end to 4:05.

Parents said that would create child-care problems and interfere with after-school activities, while teachers warned of waning attention spans among younger children and said colleagues unhappy with the changes might leave.

“We value everyone in our community and hope to come to a compromise to support our community, educators included,” said Lucy Klain, the board’s president.

The vote came three years after Lower Merion previously pushed off a plan to make start-time changes amid a national movement to better align school schedules with teens’ sleep needs. Because children’s biological clocks shift later as they reach adolescence — making it difficult to fall asleep and wake up early — leading medical organizations say teens should start school no earlier than 8:30.

But pushing start times has been a challenge for many schools in the Philadelphia region, including Lower Merion. The district dashed its last proposal after an uproar from elementary parents, upset about a proposed 7:45 start for their children.

That brought the district to its current plan, which keeps elementary school starting last. Though some parents called for instead putting it first, given younger children’s tendency to wake earlier, some on the board indicated they weren’t inclined to revisit that arrangement, given the previous backlash.

Board members said they were committed to making a change — having “heard loud and clear from the community that we needed to implement this plan,” Klain said.

Still, the prospect of any delay spurred frustration and anger from parents who spoke during Monday’s meeting, noting how long the district had been debating the start-times issue, and the agreement from medical experts that teenagers shouldn’t be starting school earlier than 8:30.

“This just can’t be put off another year,” said Amy Norr, who had children in kindergarten when district parents first brought sleep-medicine physicians to the school board in 1999, and who has spent 10 years working to enact start-time changes.

Audience members groaned as board members questioned the district’s acting superintendent, Megan Shafer, asking if another year of planning would help alleviate the myriad challenges involved in changing start times.

Busing is complex in Lower Merion, which runs a three-tier system, meaning elementary, middle, and high school start and end times must be far enough apart for drivers to complete their routes to each. The district, like others, also buses students to private schools; buses run to more than 130 schools daily.

Shafer said more time would allow the district to analyze and inform families of how their routes might change as a result of the shifting schedules — for instance, a child who used to spend 10 minutes on the bus might instead ride for 40 minutes, she said.

She also expressed concern about potential staff departures and elementary teachers pulling back on their involvement in after-school activities — a prospect raised by teachers in a district survey — and “compounding stress on the organization” as a result of changes.

“This is a polarized issue,” Shafer said, with a survey of more than 8,000 students, parents, and staff drawing split responses: About 26%, for instance, said they were “completely satisfied” with the proposed changes, while 24% were “completely dissatisfied.”

On Monday night, some parents in favor of start-time changes cast doubt on the survey findings — accusing opponents of the plan of an effort to “sabotage” the results.

Some also questioned the responses from teachers; according to the district, elementary school teachers who provided feedback in email “overwhelmingly expressed the belief that if this time change goes into effect, a lot of elementary school teachers will leave the district.”

“If teachers want to leave for a 20-minute difference, they shouldn’t be here anyway,” one woman said, drawing some “yeses” from the crowd.

Yair Lev, a parent of young children who had been pushing for a vote against the proposal, accused proponents of the plan of “bullying” him and school board members.

“Stop scaring us,” he told the crowd. Another man, faulting arguments that elementary parents should think about when their children will be in high school, said it was “completely disingenuous” to suggest “that I should just ignore the next eight years of my life.”

Supporters of the changes said concerns about the impacts on other grades were misplaced given the importance of adolescent sleep, with research showing sleep-deprived youth experience higher levels of anxiety and depression and are more prone to injuries and car crashes, among other negative impacts.

“The science is consistent and it keeps pointing in one direction,” said Indira Gurubhagavatula, a physician and associate professor of sleep medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who is also a Lower Merion parent.

Referring to Shafer’s comment about the stress on employees, Gurubhagavatula said: “What about the compounding stress on students, week after week, month after month, year after year, trying to survive your abusive schedule?”

In authorizing the district to move forward with changes in 2024, the board called for modifying the schedules so no school would get out later than 4 — with the potential for middle school “to possibly start slightly earlier,” Klain said. The proposal had already bumped middle school earlier, from 8:15 to 8 — a shift some have noted doesn’t align with medical recommendations. (Lower Merion’s previous plan put middle school last, which detractors said would interfere with after-school activities.)

“All things considered, most people don’t like change,” Shafer said, though she said that more time would help community members adjust. “So they’re going to resist, no matter what we do.”