Getting up early for school/college/work/whatever is literally one of the worst things on the planet. And while teenagers may not have regular hangovers to deal with, they do have those oh-so special teenage hormones that basically require them to sleep later than other humans. It’s true. They do.
When she found out that her school was thinking about making its students come to class even earlier, Jilly Dos Santos, 17, of Colombia, Missouri was all like: ‘Helllllllll no, bitches!’ and set out to petition the school board of Rock Bridge High School on the plan. Wait until you hear this though: she made such a strong case for sleep that the school board not only scrapped the early start plans, it even pushed back its existing times by half an hour.
When the school wanted to change the start time from 7.50am to 7.20am, Dos Santos fully lost it. ‘I thought, if that happens, I will die. I will drop out of school!’ she told the New York Times. We feel you, Jilly. School starts early in America, but that does seem stupidly early, so we see why one might literally feel like dying over it.
Dos Santos presented the school with a ton of evidence proving that teens have to go to sleep later because their melatonin kicks in a bit later in the evening, as well as stats that they perform better in class after eight or nine hours of sleep, so it stands to reason that they function better at a later start time. In some schools where the start time was pushed back, grades improved and there were fewer car crashes among 16-18 year-old drivers.
Dos Santos started campaigns over Facebook and Twitter, encouraging her schoolmates to dress nicely and come to board meetings to state their case. It worked. Not only did she succeed in scuppering the earlier start, she even got it pushed back to 8.55am.
Now, please excuse us while we research the benefits of coming into work at 10am, so we may present the evidence to our boss.
Picture: Ada Hamza
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.