It was announced on March 17th that the School District of Philadelphia will change most of their high school start times to 9 A.M. starting in the fall of 2022. With the North Penn School District being only 20 miles away, could we see changes in the near future to follow Philadelphia’s new change? Such a change may excite morning weary students but pump the brakes. There are plenty of reasons this may not be the best course of action.

Many students in NPSD depend on the bus to transport them to school. Pushing back start times could cause an issue with transportation. Finding bus drivers is already hard to find. Pushing back start times could make it even harder. This would require some fixing to the bus schedule.

After-school activities are very important to many students at NPHS. North Penn hosts over 70 clubs and sports teams. If start times were to get pushed back, so would the end time. Starting at 9 A.M. would mean leaving around 4 P.M., leaving considerably less time for activities. For sports teams, if they have an away game, they wouldn’t get back to the high school until about 10 P.M. Another thing is, outside of school activities wouldn’t be about to happen. Some facilities for activities might not have lights, like a basketball court at a park. Those recreational activities wouldn’t be able to happen because daylight is limited.

Changing the start time would also waste about 2 hours of your day. Although you have a spare 2 hours before school now, there is about no chance you are going to be productive during those hours. Most high school students would rather sleep than get up and do something productive with this extra time.

Most high school students work. With a push back of school end time, work hours would be even more limited than they already are. Working that 3 to 10 shift at your job would now become 5:30 to 10 shifts. Some students work so that they can help support their families. Pushing back the start times would potentially endanger a student’s financial situation.

Changing start times for our school would not be ideal for multiple reasons, and the list above is just a few major reasons. Leave a comment below if you think we should keep our start time the same, or push it forward