START SCHOOL LATER INC

Mission
We are a coalition of health professionals, sleep scientists, educators, parents, students, and other concerned citizens dedicated to increasing public awareness about the relationship between sleep and school hours and to ensuring school start times compatible with health, safety, education, and equity.

Goals
Our primary goals include:

(1) Collaborating with health professionals, sleep scientists, educators, parents, students, and other concerned citizens dedicated to increasing public awareness about the relationship between sleep and school hours and to ensuring school start times compatible with health, safety, education, and equity.

(2) Educating the public about the relationship between sleep, school start times, and physical, psychological, and educational well-being, utilizing education awareness forums, professional networking, symposiums, teaching presentations and social media outreach

(3) Providing resources, support and guidance to local communities working for later school start times

(4) Serving as an information clearinghouse by collecting and consolidating information and data about school start times and efforts to change them

(5) Advocating for legislation to ensure evidence-based school hours at the national, state and local levels

We are utilizing a multi-pronged approach to educate, advocate for school start times in the following areas simultaneously:
* national level guidance
* state level legislation
* local level advocacy, education and assistance with implementation

Changing the school start time requires inclusion and buy in from all the community stakeholders for a good implementation. Because of competing and conflicting interests and shrinking budgets, most local school districts are hardpressed to make change. State legislation is critical to gain widespread familiarity with the issue of school start times.

We have expanded our program offerings to provide sleep education programming for teachers, administrators and students at the college and high school level. We provide implementation and sleep health webinars and provide coaching support for community members pursuing healthy and safe school start times.

On the national level, we have a responsibility to ensure that children are going to school at a safe time. Federal legislation can serve to provide guidance for all school systems in the United States and beyond.

We have an expanded network of supporters in local chapters in 31 states, Washington DC and three countries.
We also have a presence on social media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which has been useful in spreading the word to sleep researchers, media contacts, school systems and concerned parents.

We have received grants and sponsorships to develop an award winning sleep education program, which is now being distributed to colleges and high schools.

We have expanded our local chapter network to reach more communities.

Prior to the formation of Start School Later, there was no legislation regarding school start times. Now, there are 11 states that have initiated legislation on examining school start times and the issue of teen sleep and too early starts has become common knowledge in the mainstream. We have been able to take decades of sleep research and apply it to the world at large. More school systems and states are examining how to change school start times to account for the delayed circadian shift of adolescents.

While there is a long way to go, we have contributed progress in keeping the issue on the forefront of education reform.

We successfully held a National Conference, bringing together sleep researchers, advocates and school administrators, which has resulted in implementation workshops, sleep health webinars, and a very successful Research Summit, in addition to our award winning Let's Sleep online sleep education modules.