I have no idea what school start times are like around here, but I'm certainly going to find out well in advance of Milo starting school. I remember starting school around 9 am and I'm horrified to hear that some schools in NYC start at 7 am! It's difficult for me to get up early and to have to be bright enough for school at that time is asking a lot from a child. I would rather have them in school later in the afternoon, than earlier in the morning. I'm going to have to do some research on this one.
Can a Lack of Sleep Set Back Your Child's Cognitive Abilities? -- New York Magazine
"The performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the normal gap between a fourth-grader and a sixth-grader. Which is another way of saying that a slightly sleepy sixth-grader will perform in class like a mere fourth-grader. “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development,” Sadeh explains."
"Convinced by the mountain of studies, a handful of school districts around the nation are starting school later in the morning. The best known of these is in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis, where the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable. “Truly flabbergasting,” said Brian O’Reilly, the College Board’s executive director for SAT Program Relations, on hearing the results."