Study Links High School Start Times, Car Wrecks Involving Teens

The San Antonio Express-News (6/11) reports that a new study "presented in San Antonio on Wednesday at the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, found that students who had to be at school by 7:20 a.m. in Virginia Beach, Virginia, were more likely to wreck their cars than those who had an 8:40 a.m. start time in nearby Chesapeake, Virginia." The study was conducted by Dr. Robert Vorona, associate professor of internal medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, who "is quick to say the study doesn't prove that the earlier bell caused the higher crash rate." Still, Vorona's results are "in keeping with the results of a 2008 study in Kentucky that found when one county pushed back the morning bell by an hour, the teen crash rate dropped by 16.5 percent."