School start times have been an interesting and debatable topic in recent years. For project 3, I worked with a fellow Apollo student and friend, Haley Adams to go more in depth on this topic.
Reasoning
For each project we have a thinking skill to incorporate into our project. Project 3s thinking skill was reasoning. There's a reason we do everything such as you need to wake up every morning at 6:30am so you can get ready for work at 7:30am. With every step and decision throughout this project, there was a reason. Haley and I decided to pursue the topic of school start times for a project because our school is in the process of figuring out if switching our start times would be beneficial for all Central York students.
English
The first few days were spent with my partner and I doing research. We came up with the possibilities of switching the elementary and secondary times, pushing back just high school and keeping elementary the same, and lastly pushing back both secondary and elementary school start times. During our research, we found pros, cons, and other very useful information on school start times and why starting later is better for students. My partner and I found out that schools such as Radnor School District and State College School District have flipped and pushed their school start times. The next step for us was to email each of the three schools to figure out how changing their school start times affected their school's money, students, parents, and teachers. We had contacted the director of communications and transportation, multiple principals, and teachers from both schools.
Art
For the art portion, Haley and I created a presentation with all the research we found, benefits, cons, getting in contact with other schools, and what we think Central York High School should do in terms of switching or pushing our school start times. The presentation was created as if we were to present it at a board meeting in front of our school's board representatives.
In the presentation, there's a slide with an video link but due to the website we used to create the presentation, the video that you see above could not be played right from the presentation. The video goes more in depth of why a majority believe that teens need later school start times from what doctors' say.