You don't have to be a doctor to know that getting a bad night's sleep just isn't good for you, and prolonged periods of sleep deprivation can lead to serious health problems in the long run.
A group of researchers at McGill University suggests the issue is especially problematic for young people.
A study published in the online Journal of Sleep Research shows that about a third of Canadian students from ages 10 to 18 don't get enough sleep, while the majority of them reported feeling tired in the morning.
Their solution — later school start times.
"It is time that we have a conversation about school start time in Canada," says the study's lead author Genevieve Gariepy, a post-doctoral student at McGill’s Institute of Health and Social Policy.
It surveyed hundreds of Canadian schools with start times ranging from 8 to 9:30 a.m., and found those who start later use that extra time for sleep — and ultimately, they perform better.
Gariepy also says kids who wake up early to get to school are not only fighting with sleep deprivation, but also with biology. As they go through puberty, she says, their circadian rhythms change to the point where falling asleep before 11 p.m. and waking up before 8 a.m. becomes much more difficult.
Lester B. Pearson board chair Suanne Stein Day says the idea of delaying school start times isn't a foreign one to her, because she's read similar studies in the past.
"I believe the study, I believe that teenagers do benefit form that extra hour or extra half hour of sleep in the morning," she says.
Most of the board's high schools, she says, have 9 a.m. start times, while the elementary schools start a little earlier. If the high schools start earlier, she says, it's for two reasons — one, it's because the individual schools chose the earlier start times, and two, because for budgetary reasons, the schools have to be synced with transport companies and their times.
"We have a budget for transporting, I think, about 7,500 or 8,000 high school students, and we have to make sure that our buses hit two schools, in some cases three schools, in order to live within the transportation budget. So those schools all have to be synced."