Hub teens, middle schoolers get later school start time

City kids can hit the snooze button next year after school officials announced a majority of middle and high schoolers will start the day later.

After a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, using 100 computers, worked overnight to mine through millions of possible start times, the district settled on a solution that has 94 percent of students in grades 7 to 12 starting after 8 a.m., up from 26 percent this year.

The number of students in elementary school who will be ending school after 4 p.m. will decrease from 33 percent this year to 15 percent next year.

The huge shift affects 105 of 125 district schools that will be getting new bell times. The changes were announced last night in an automated phone call to families and on boston public schools. org/ start times.

“School bell times have tangible impacts on the lives of families, ranging from jobs to a student’s academic performance,” said Superintendent Tommy Chang in a statement. “As a district, we must make sure that our students and families are set up for success, and they deserve nothing less.”

It comes after the Boston School Committee approved a new bell time policy that aims to increase the number of high school students starting after 8 a.m., increase the number of elementary school students dismissed before 4 p.m. and assign schools with higher numbers of medically fragile students or students with autism to bell times reflective of their needs and reinvest money from the changes back into classrooms.

Snowden International School teacher Natalia Cuadra-Saez said there are trade-offs to the switch. Snowden High is shifting its start time from 7:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.

“There is going to be pros and cons,” CuadraSaez said. “It is really hard now to teach first period with students falling asleep. At the same time, a lot of my students have obligations after school. That’s my main concern — how will this impact their families?”

Research from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics points to the benefits for teenagers to sleep in later as their bodies grow and change.

Dr. Judith Owens, the director of sleep medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, said, “Later school start times promote healthy sleep, which not only helps students perform better academically, but decreases the risk of car crashes, depression, and alcohol and substance abuse.”