[Alexander] Hoey, who is from Macungie, Lehigh County, said he always used to feel tired for the first few periods when the Hill School started at 7:55.
“You’d get out of it toward lunch,” he recalled, in between bites of pancakes in the school’s wood-paneled dining hall.
Now, after a schedule manipulation that required shaving off a few minutes here and there from activities throughout the day, he and other students say they feel more alert and productive. Visits to the school nurse went down, and grade-point averages even went up by two-tenths of a point, said Jennifer Lagor, assistant headmaster for student life.
My kids would have to get up around 5:30 to catch the bus, and then ride around for 45 minutes because theirs is the first stop on the route. So I drive them to get them there at 7:15 instead. Even in middle school they had to be there before 8 (I drove them then too). It was a comparative paradise in boarding school to not have to get down to breakfast until 8 or so, but then we didn’t have buses which had to take the middle and elementary school kids after they disposed of us.