Volume 49 Issue 3
November 2015
Freedom High School - 3149 Chester Avenue - Bethlehem, PA 18020 - www.FHSForum.com - @FHSForum
In This Issue: The perfect
Another victory for Freedom
student 2 Dear Gabi
3 Staff Editorial 4 Uber driving service 5 The new hover board 10
FHS swimming and diving
On Saturday, November 7, 2015, at Frank Banko Stadium the Freedom football team faced their number one rivalry school, Libert y High School. At the end of the fourth quarter, Freedom defeated Liberty by 35-21, earning the team its first Eastern Pennsylvania Conference title.
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Photo: Stephanie Augello
Sleep-deprived students suffer Lack of sleep can have detrimental results on students in physical and mental health By Josh Christiansen Editorials Editor
Every morning, thousands of teenagers walk into the classrooms of their high schools, exhausted and sleep deprived. This can cause serious problems for these students and their educational success. “Teens need about 8 to 10 hours of sleep each night to function best. Most teens do not get enough sleep — one study found that only 15% reported sleeping 8 1/2 hours on school nights,” said the National Sleep Foundation, a non-profit organization, on their website. All human beings follow the natural cycles called the Circadian Rhythms. These rhythms are essentially a person’s internal body clock. Every day a teen needs to wake up to go to school at 7:00 a.m-8:00 a.m., their natural internal body clock is
disrupted. This is one cause of many for sleepy students. “I do think teenagers don’t get enough sleep. They should sleep at least 8-10 hours a day. I went to a school nurse conference and [I learned] that your sleep cycles aren’t conducive to school. When we study the circadian rhythms for a teenager, [we know] you need to go to bed a little bit later, but you should also be sleeping in later. Ideally, it would be perfect if you could start school at like 9:00 a.m. or 10:00 a.m.,” said Mrs. Susan Dalton, school nurse. Although biology is a factor, there are many more reasons that students do not get adequate sleep. Large homework loads, outside obligations such as community service, sports, or clubs, family time, or social time can also lead to less sleep and awkward sleep patterns. “Students who are in higher
classes and want to go somewhere push themselves, because they feel like if they don’t, they won’t be successful in life. They also think that if they don’t have the highest grades, then they’re not going to get into a good college. I think all of the stress is what affects the students and lack of sleep,” said Hailey Stuppino, junior, when asked why motivated students might be more prone to sleep loss. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, students are also at a higher risk of diseases, poor school performance, low test scores, automobile crashes, and can lead to medical issues like depression, insomnia, and sleep apnea. The results of lack of sleep are significant enough in a student’s life for this problem to be a public health issue; one that has been put in the public spotlight in the past couple years.
With teens having irregular ule,” said Mrs. Dalton. sleep patterns; staying up late Sleep is vital to a student’s during the week and sleeping well-being, as important as in late on the weekends, can the air they breathe, the water affect their biological clock they drink and the food they and sleep patterns. In order to eat. It can even help them to solve this large sleep loss is- eat better and manage the sue, there are many factors stress of being a teen and a that can be changed in a stu- student in today’s competitive dent’s life or sleep routine at world of education. night. “Students need to make a concerted effort to try to go to bed at 10:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m., at the very latest. They need to learn how to turn it down—that means no texting on the phone, no video games, no TV, anything like that—but they can listen to music, or drink a warm cup of noncaffeinated tea. They also need to get into a sleep routine, so that Chance Sigafoos poses as though he is they are really getting asleep before the class starts into a good sleep schedPhoto illustration: Joshua Christiansen