Talk about teen mental health should include a harmful CMS policy | Opinion
The author is a Charlotte developmental and sports neuropsychologist whose practice focuses on brain health, sleep, learning, and mental health.
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The recent reporting by Théoden Janes on the tragic deaths of Myers Park High School students has prompted difficult but necessary conversations about adolescent mental health. Parents, educators, healthcare providers, and community leaders are asking important questions about depression, anxiety, stress, and suicide.
Suicide is among the most complex public health challenges we face. Mental illness, life stressors, family circumstances, trauma, substance use, social pressures, and countless other factors may contribute. Anyone searching for a single cause is unlikely to find one.
But as our community searches for ways to support struggling teenagers, we should also be willing to examine policies that science has been questioning for decades.
One of those policies is CMS high school start times – among the earliest in the nation.
Charlotte has invested considerable effort in promoting adolescent mental health. We encourage students to seek help. We ask parents to watch for warning signs. We expand services, promote wellness, and work to reduce stigma surrounding mental health challenges. Those efforts matter.
But sleep is not a wellness initiative. It is a biological requirement.
Sleep science is remarkably clear. During puberty, normal developmental changes shift the body’s internal clock later, making it difficult for many teens to fall asleep early enough to obtain the 8–10 hours of sleep their developing brains require. Yet CMS students must wake before dawn and wait for buses in the dark just to arrive at school by 7:15 AM.
This is not a matter of motivation, discipline, parenting, or teenagers wanting to sleep in. It’s biology.
The issue isn’t whether teens can function at 7:15 AM. Many do, every day. The question is whether we should knowingly structure school around conditions that compromise both brain health and academic success when decades of research tell us better options exist.
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Research has consistently linked insufficient sleep to increased rates of depression, anxiety, irritability, emotional dysregulation, risk-taking behavior, academic difficulties, motor vehicle crashes, and suicidal thoughts. We would never intentionally design a school schedule that impairs attention, memory, learning, emotional regulation, decision-making, driving safety, and mental health.
Yet that is precisely what chronic sleep deprivation does to the teenage brain.
More than a decade ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high schools begin no earlier than 8:30 AM. Leading sleep and medical organizations continue to echo that recommendation.
Decades of research show that later school start times improve attendance, academic and athletic performance, graduation rates, driving safety, and mental health. Contrary to a common myth, teens don’t simply stay up later—they actually sleep more.
If sleep were a medication that improved attention, learning, mood, emotional regulation, and driving safety, school districts across America would be racing to provide it.
Instead, many communities continue to schedule against it.
Whenever later school start times are discussed, familiar logistical concerns emerge around transportation, athletics, after-school activities, jobs, and more. These are legitimate questions that deserve thoughtful planning and community discussion. Yet these are solvable logistical problems that hundreds of school districts around the country have already solved because they concluded that adolescent health was worth the effort and that the long-term returns exceeded the costs of implementation.
No one should suggest that later school start times will eliminate depression or prevent every tragedy. The challenges facing today’s teens are far too complex for such simplistic promises.
But when an intervention is biologically sound, supported by decades of research, endorsed by major medical organizations, associated with improved mental health and educational outcomes, and entirely within our power to implement, continuing to ignore it becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
Charlotte cannot control every factor affecting teen mental health.
But we can stop making it harder.
And we can change the time we ring that first bell.
Dr. Marla Shapiro is a nationally certified school psychologist, board-certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist, and parent.
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This story was originally published June 18, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
