EDITORIAL: Don’t expect miracles from later school start times

To much fanfare, Clark County School District officials on Tuesday unveiled new start times for local schools this fall. The goal is to give high school students more time to refresh themselves each night in an effort to improve academic engagement and performance. But don’t expect miracles.

Beginning in August, local high school classes will start 90 minutes later, at 8:30 a.m. Meanwhile, elementary schools will be pushed back 15 minutes to 9:15 a.m., and middle school campuses will begin classes at 7:30 a.m., a half hour earlier than the current schedule. The change will force the district to spend an additional $10.7 million on a combination of new buses and additional bus drivers.

“The decision to adjust start times,” Superintendent Jhone Ebert said, “is a commitment to student health, safety and academic achievement.”

While some research has found benefits in later start times, the benefits are difficult to quantify given the myriad factors that go into academic performance. “Studying the effects of varying school start times can be challenging,” concluded University of North Carolina professors Kevin C. Bastian and Sarah Crittenden Fuller in a 2023 Brookings paper. “Comparing academic outcomes across schools with different start times may conflate start time effects with other characteristics of schools and districts.”

In fact, the district’s new schedule runs counter to the findings of the two Brookings researchers, at least when it comes to those in the middle grades. “We find that student absences increase after middle schools switch to an earlier start time,” Mr. Bastian and Ms. Fuller wrote. “These results are particularly large for economically disadvantaged students. … We find robust evidence linking later start times to increased test scores for middle school students.”

Yet the district’s reform pushes sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders into the classroom at an earlier hour, even as district test scores show deterioration in academic proficiency between elementary school and high school.

It’s also worth noting that the district juggled its start times as recently as three years ago, with little evidence so far that the move has boosted academic achievement.

In the end, it will be up to high schoolers and their parents to ensure they use the later start times wisely. There’s no guarantee that a high number of teenagers won’t squander the extra 90 minutes in the morning by simply staying up later at night.

Later start times may indeed prove beneficial to many older students. But it will take more than this modest step to significantly improve the district’s wanting academic performance.