EPISCOPAL UP CLOSE
n H E A LT H A N D W E L L B E I N G
The Science Of SLEEP The Episcopal campus engaged in an experiment so exciting, the administration hoped it would put students to sleep.
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The results, Nate says, were clear enough to call for the School to consider what might be done to try and address the matter. “The responses indicated that more students were losing sleep on Wednesday and Thursday due in some part to homework load and how the periods rotate during the week,” says Nate. “The responses also made clear that our later start on Monday made a real difference in their sleep.”
Episcopal’s heightened concern about and focus on student sleep health this year began in August with conversations around At What Cost by Dr. David Gleason, a book that examines the root causes of increased levels of teen anxiety and depression. Two of the factors most intensely discussed were sleep deprivation and homework overload, and administrators spent the fall considering ways to address these concerns.
Throughout December, key administrators looked into weekly schedules at peer schools and sought other resources for ways Episcopal might address the issue.
“In the fall, we conducted a school-wide survey to investigate students’ nightly sleep and homework patterns,” says Academic Dean Nate Ebel, who worked with Dean of Students Ashley Taylor on the survey. “We wanted to get a clearer picture of which nights they slept most or least, how much sleep they were getting over the course of a week, and to what degree their nightly homework assignments might play into the picture.”
“We sent out a second survey to students to collect responses and data from the experiment and compare the results,” says Ashley. “We’ll spend the late spring and summer considering a longer-term approach to the weekly schedule. If we are confident in our findings, we’ll seek to have a new schedule in the fall of 2018. If not, we’ll seek more opportunities for trial runs until we find the most promising approach.”
From the start of the second semester on Jan. 30 until the start of Spring Break on March 3, the weekly schedule was adjusted to improve the quality and quantity of student sleep.