Letter To The Editor: In Response To Suicide Coverage

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Thank you for your articles on Severna Park’s suicide problem. I would like to see more discussion of the role of sleep deprivation in teen mental health. It is well-known that teens who get too little sleep are at increased risk of depression and suicide. Although some may blame poor choices for a teen’s lack of sleep, I believe heavy homework loads are a factor.

Anne Arundel County Public Schools guidelines recommend about 90 minutes of homework per night for high school students, or 22.5 minutes for each of a day’s four courses. Yet some teachers routinely give one to two hours of work for a single course, or three to six times the recommended amount. AACPS guidelines also specify that homework should count for 10% of the grade, yet this rule is circumvented by assigning additional work to be done at home under the heading of “assessments” or other wording. Thus, 30% or more of a course grade may depend on work done at home, which means that students headed for college have no choice but to put in long hours to keep up their marks. Finally, a student who is absent due to illness has an equal number of days to catch up on homework, so he or she will have to do double the normal homework load when returning from an illness. If the normal homework load were 90 minutes, the double load of three hours would be achievable. But actual homework loads are usually closer to three hours a night, bringing the double load up to six hours for students returning from illness! All this on top of a seven-hour school day. Many teenagers are just not physically able to sustain such a heavy workload.

Thanks again for your help in addressing the problem of teen suicide. A group called Parenting for a Different World has started meeting at the Severna Park Community Center at 7:00pm on the second Thursday of every month to see what can be done to change the culture and help our young people.

Caroline Melles

Severna Park

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