by Dr. Andrew Davies
Head of School
andrewd@isb.ac.th
Dear ISB Community,
As part of our later start research, ISB will be trialling an 8:10am start time on Tuesday 3rd November.
The school day will end at 2:05pm and all buses/vans will depart at the usual times of 2:15pm, 3:30pm and 5:00pm. All scheduled after school activities/sports will take place.
We are expecting morning buses & vans to arrive by 7:50am. It is intended that all students traveling by Montri Transportation will be picked up 30 minutes later than usual in the morning, but please be aware that traffic may result in some delays.
We ask that parents do not bring children to school before 7.30am on this day.
This day has been selected for the trial as 3rd November was initially scheduled as an Early Dismissal Day. As a result, no learning time or after school activities/sports will be impacted.
Each division will send out schedule details for this day after the October break.
Once the trial has been completed, we will follow up with surveys for parents, students and teachers. We will also be reviewing Montri van departure and arrival times to assess impact on travel times.
A decision on whether or not to continue researching a later start option for 2016/17 will be made this semester, after we have reviewed all survey and Montri data. If we decide to continue our research, we will make sure that we reach out to all community groups to gain a more comprehensive understanding of potential impacts before any decision is made.
For parents new to ISB, please find copied below a rationale that was distributed last year as well as some links to recent research.
If anyone has any concerns or suggestions, please either contact me personally or divisional administrators.
Sincerely,
Dr. Andrew Davies
Head of School
andrewd@isb.ac.th
Rationale
Current research into human sleep patterns has shown that there is a significant change as children mature into adolescents and then again into adults (click here for research collected by the University of Minnesota). The onset of puberty sees a shift of approximately 2 hours in adolescent sleep patterns to later in the evening, for example moving from a 9pm sleep time to11pm sleep time. This then continues until around 19.5 years in women and 21 in men, and then it reverses. For a teenager, a6 am alarm call is the equivalent of a 4 am start for an adult. Additional factors to changes in sleep habits include a more relaxed attitude to bedtimes, a general disregard for the importance of sleep, and access to multiple forms of technology which promote alertness and eat into time available for sleep.
Lack of sleep can result in poorer memory, lack of focus, diminished academic achievement and a host of physical ailments and other risk factors. Studies at Brown University in the US have shown that teenagers need around 9 hours of sleep or more in order to function at an optimum level. Many of our students are managing significantly less than this, so we are looking to see what we can do to address this issue.
In other schools which have adjusted their start time to later, or have a later start time, there has been measurable evidence to indicate improvement in learning and wellness.