Clocking out

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Turning back the clock: a common turn of phrase used to describe the process of resetting our days to standard time in the winter, and a cause of distress to busy students looking for sunlight in their day- today lives. Daylight savings time was first implemented during WWI to save resources and better utilize sunlight. It is still in practice in most parts of the U.S. and causes clocks to be set forward one hour on the second Sunday in March and moved back an hour on the first Sunday in November.

On Feb. 1 the sun rose at 7:52 a.m. and set at 6:03 p.m. meaning that there were about 10 hours of sunlight during that day. With school being from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., seven and a half hours of this daylight was spent indoors, in a classroom. Students who participate in extracurriculars might average an extra two to three hours at school after the bell has rung or may be arriving early before the 7:52 a.m. sunrise, which can lead to a schedule with little to no sunlight exposure. I have

Madelyn Lerew

personally felt this as I tend to arrive at school at 8:00 a.m. and have had practices that end at 6:00 p.m. three to four times a week.

The aforementioned students restricted to school during daylight hours are forced to lead their winter lives in the dark, which can lead to them being put into dangerous situations. According to a study conducted in the UK and reported by the Review of Economics and Statistics, darkness increases the number of automobile accidents per hour by seven percent. This means that students involved in extracurriculars, who would be forced to drive to and from school in the dark, are going to have an increased risk of being involved in a collision as opposed to their peers. This statistic becomes a much scarier reality when also considering that drivers ages 15 to 20 make up six percent of U.S. drivers but are accountable for 14% of fatal crashes, according to Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Inexperienced student drivers should not be forced into the position of driving home in the dark due to their extracurricular commitments. Lack of exposure to sunlight, while it does not seem all that serious health wise, can lead to a number of health concerns. Vitamin D is produced by your skin when exposed to sunlight, and according to Mayo Clinic helps to build strong bones and prevent cancer. When indoors all day the body doesn’t receive the sunlight it needs to produce Vitamin D which can cause a deficiency. Other negative health effects can be seen in the increased rate of heart attacks due to the springtime shift, according to PLOS Computational Biology, a peer-reviewed journal. These damaging effects are simply not worth the ‘extra hours’ of daylight in the morning.

However, the problems that arise from resetting the world to standard time in the winter could be resolved by operating on daylight savings time yearround. This would remove the changing of the clocks and the health problems that arise from it. The sun would set an hour later in the winter with this change, meaning that students staying after school would receive the gift of an hour of sunlight at the end of each day.