As Lower Merion tries (again) to start high school later, most Philly-area districts can’t seem to budge to get teens more sleep

The alarms would start going off every morning at 6, but Kim Lipetz’s oldest son wouldn’t get out of bed.

Instead, the repetitive blaring from not just his phone alarm, but a traditional alarm clock, began a 40-minute back-and-forth, with Lipetz running upstairs to “literally shake” her son awake after he fell back asleep — a daily battle that led to arguments between family members, and her son almost always sprinting to catch his 7:02 bus to Lower Merion High School.

“I had no idea how difficult those four years would be,” said Lipetz, whose son graduated in 2021.

Lower Merion is poised to vote this month on a change that Lipetz believes would have lifted that burden: starting high school later. The proposal, which would delay the start of high school from 7:30 to 8:40, comes more than three years after an earlier plan was abandoned amid backlash over its impact on younger students’ schedules.

It’s the latest effort in a national movement that has been underway for decades, propelled by a growing chorus of experts (and subsequent Facebook parenting groups) who say middle and high schools should start no earlier than 8:30 to accommodate a shift in adolescents’ biological clocks that leads to later bedtimes and, often, sleep deprivation. California last year required high schools to start at 8:30 or later, a proposal that also has been introduced in New Jersey.

» READ MORE: Philly’s plan to start high schools later? It’s been postponed.

But later start times have yet to catch hold in much of the Philadelphia region. While some districts have made changes, most haven’t budged.

The reasons: a tangled web of logistics, from busing to child care to after-school activities. Community resistance, including because starting high school later often requires changes to middle and elementary school schedules as well.

The fact that relatively few districts have acted is also self-reinforcing: A district that makes a shift falls out of step with most others, including for scheduling athletic contests.

“There is no critical mass of districts that have done this,” said Jim Crisfield, superintendent of the Wissahickon School District, which recently postponed a vote on start-time changes that a survey found weren’t supported by most students or staff.

Crisfield noted that while some districts have delayed high school start times — Tredyffrin/Easttown, Phoenixville, and Unionville-Chadds Ford among them — most haven’t gone as far as pushing them to 8:30, the standard advised by the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Association. (Among the exceptions: “the holy grail of Radnor,” Crisfield said, and Garnet Valley.)

“It’s not like the rest of us don’t want to do it or don’t believe in the science — we do,” Crisfield said. “It’s just that the challenges are very real.”

Philadelphia last year paused a plan to shift all high school start times to 9 a.m.; students, families, and schools had raised concerns ranging from kids’ safety leaving school later in the day to some students’ need to work or take care of siblings.

To bump high school back to 8:40, Lower Merion is proposing to move middle school 15 minutes earlier to 8 a.m., and shifting elementary school 20 minutes later to 9:20. The elementary school day would also be extended by 10 minutes, ending at 4:05.

The changes at the other grade levels are due to busing: The district operates a “three-tier” system, spacing elementary, middle, and high schools start times far enough apart for drivers to complete routes to each.

Moving to a double- or single-tier system would require a lot more buses and drivers — both sticking points for the district, which already hasn’t been able to fully staff its runs amid a national bus driver shortage and says it doesn’t have space to park more buses.

Like other districts, Lower Merion also buses students to private schools — bringing the total number of destinations to 136. The district put out a request for proposals for a company to take over the nonpublic bus runs; only one responded, at a cost of $3 million a year, spokesperson Amy Buckman said. District administrators didn’t recommend the outsourcing.

Ultimately, “there aren’t that many options,” said Lisa Prosnitz, a Lower Merion parent who has been advocating for start-time changes — which she noted were first broached by parents in the district in 1999.

“It’s something the community has been really, really hungry for for a very long time,” said Prosnitz, who is also part of a regional coalition seeking later start times. “Our kids are definitely suffering” — not just during high school, but from long-term health effects associated with chronic sleep deprivation.

Prosnitz called the current proposal “definitely better than our existing schedule,” given the 70-minute delay for high schoolers, but acknowledged the earlier middle-school time doesn’t meet medical recommendations for an 8:30 start.

Some parents of elementary-school students, meanwhile, are unhappy with the proposed shift to 9:20 and the post-4 p.m. finish for their children — citing a lack of morning child care and concerns the schedule would limit after-school activities and family time.

“Everybody’s in a panic,” said Ramy Khalil, a parent of a second grader and incoming kindergartener who has been trying to marshal opposition to the proposal.

Khalil said he understands the science behind a later start for older children, but felt the district was pushing the change at the expense of its youngest — a similar argument to three years ago, when elementary parents rebelled against a proposed 7:45 start as too early.

“We’re going to wait a decade to learn these kids are not playing sports, not learning a supplementary language?” Khalil said.

Lower Merion has been surveying parents, students, and staff about the proposed changes and conducting feedback sessions with the help of an outside public relations firm. The district also hired a second firm to prepare messaging around the proposal, at a total cost of $141,500.

In a message to the community last week that acknowledged concerns from elementary parents, the district said it would address the school board on March 13 about feedback it’s received. A vote on the proposal is scheduled for March 20.

In Garnet Valley, school leaders decided to take a different approach to push high school from 7:35 to 8:35 — relying on “blended” online and in-person learning. The district already had been incorporating online learning before the pandemic, and saw it as a solution to start high school later without pushing back the entire day.

Now, nearly all high school classes are blended — meaning a student may attend a class in person three days and be assigned other work to complete at their own pace, whether during an optional advisory period at 8:05 a.m., lunchtime, or after school gets out at 2:30.

“Kids today, they’re all involved in something after school,” said Superintendent Marc Bertrando. “We had to maintain our existing end time.” He said the blended model also helps prepare kids for college courses that may be online and teaches time management: “We have to stop equating our experiences during COVID with online learning.”

(Crisfield, the Wissahickon superintendent, said the Garnet Valley approach was “an incredibly large paradigm shift that most districts aren’t ready to consider.”)

Others are pressing forward with smaller shifts. In Downingtown, the school board is considering a proposal to move start times back by 20 minutes — bumping secondary schools from 7:40 to 8. One of the district’s high schools doesn’t have lights on its athletic field, making it difficult to push school any later, said parent Stef Rosinsky. (Lower Merion faces a similar issue, and a plan to add lights to Arnold Field has drawn opposition from neighbors; Buckman, the spokesperson, said the district “remains hopeful that a plan for lights that meets the needs of the community and student athletes can be agreed upon.”)

Still, “my hope is this is not the end, just the beginning of the shift,” said Rosinsky, a licensed clinical social worker who views the start-time issue as key to mental health.

It wasn’t always the norm for high schools to start this early, said Indira Gurubhagavatula, a physician and associate professor of sleep medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. To reduce busing costs, she said, districts adopted multitiered systems — starting high schools first so young children wouldn’t have to wait for buses in the dark.

But now that the science is clear teenagers have a biological tendency toward a later bedtime — and with studies showing later start times are associated with improved attendance, better grades, and fewer car accidents — schools should be making the switch, said Gurubhagavatula, who is also a Lower Merion parent.

In Radnor, which in 2019 shifted its high school start time back 55 minutes to 8:30 — a change it made by pushing middle school 10 minutes earlier, to 7:50, and elementary seven minutes later, to 9:07 — Michele Leonard said the extra sleep was “life-changing” for her two sons in high school at the time.

There are no longer high schoolers in the district who experienced the 7:35 start, and “no one really talks about it,” said Leonard, who had advocated for the shift. “Now that it’s changed, it just is what it is.”

Staff writer Kristen A. Graham contributed to this article.