CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Later High School Start Time Debate

Parents in the Prairie Ridge School Division have until month’s end to comment on a proposal that would push the first bell at its six high schools from 8:15 to 9:10 a.m. next September. Later starts are hardly novel, and results elsewhere have been inconclusive. Fresh urgency comes from a division survey in which roughly two-thirds of high school students endorsed a later bell.

Dr. Anika Sorensen, a paediatrician specializing in adolescent sleep, grounds the case in biology, not preference. During puberty the body’s internal clock shifts, leaving most teenagers physiologically incapable of falling asleep before eleven. “Demanding alertness at 8:15 is comparable to expecting an adult to write a mathematics exam at four in the morning,” she maintains. Sorensen is careful not to oversell, though. “If the phone stays under the pillow until one, we’ve simply moved the problem.”

Board chair Gordon Feist does not contest the research, but bus logistics preoccupy him. The same buses currently complete the high school routes first and the elementary runs afterward. Delaying secondary classes would require either adding about twelve vehicles, at an estimated $1.4 million annually, or reversing the sequence, which would leave young children waiting beside country roads in January darkness. “I refuse to resolve one group’s difficulty by bequeathing a worse one to another,” says Feist.

Marisol Quintero’s objections are domestic. Her son, a Grade 11 student, works three afternoons weekly at a grocery store, plays junior hockey and, saving for college, cannot reduce his hours. He also supervises his eight-year-old sister until Quintero returns from her shift. “He’s hardly cheerful at breakfast,” she concedes. “But our schedule’s a puzzle, and this proposal would remove the load-bearing piece.”

Devin Achterberg, student council president at Prairie Ridge Collegiate, favours a later start in principle but distrusts a division-wide switch. “Plenty of my classmates would merely stay up later,” he concedes. The council has instead proposed a one-year pilot in which one school begins at 9:10 every Wednesday, with sleep and attendance monitored throughout. Encouraging data would give trustees evidence persuasive to parents; disappointing results would cost little.

Having taught first-period chemistry for fifteen years, I can vouch for Dr. Sorensen’s main argument: at 8:15, half my students are 6. Choose…still on night timeglued to their phonesshort of study timeworn out by part-time jobs. Still, Mr. Feist persuaded me more than I expected. No plan is worth adopting if it 7. Choose…costs teenagers their part-time jobsburdens the youngest insteadshortens the teenage school dayignores what students voted for, and $1.4 million would otherwise reach classrooms.

I sympathize with Ms. Quintero too, though I suspect her real worry is 8. Choose…paying for hockeythe price of new buseswho will watch her young daughterher own shift schedule, not hockey. The student council’s idea strikes me as wisest: a 9. Choose…survey of every parentWednesday-only trialdivision-wide switchsecond bus fleet would cost little and replace opinion with hard evidence. I also admire the students for admitting 10. Choose…the limits of the division’s surveythe cost to the boardtheir families’ objectionsthe weak spot in their own case. If the pilot succeeds, I will happily back the full change next year.