Summer’s over class, Hello rulers, hello books, just avoid those teachers dirty looks!

While summer officially has a few more weeks to play out, the real end of summer comes with Labour Day weekend. The return to school signals the end of sleeping in (unless of course your course load allows for it) the financing of school supplies and the return to classes. The CBC’s website has a couple of back to school stories to get everyone thinking about education as the first day of school dawns.

The first a study that suggests what may be the obvious, that kids in smaller classes tend to do better in school’s with less crowding and less threats. The smaller classes are also better for the teachers, who tend to have a more productive working environment in smaller numbers.

The second story brings bad news for those kids that have become used to the late night routine of summer; two new studies have determined that those children who did not get proper sleep during the night were more likely to have behavioral and cognitive problems in the classroom.

The third story featured on the website has to do with those kids that have become disruptive over the years and how Universities in British Columbia can share confidential medical records about troubled students if there's a perceived a threat to public safety. The Privacy commissioner offered his interpretation of the privacy concerns in response to the high profile instances violence in schools in the USA of recent times.

Just a few items to ease you back into another school year.

Student attendance better in small schools: B.C. research
Last Updated: Monday, September 3, 2007 3:10 PM PT
CBC News

Attending a smaller school results in students who miss fewer days and are less likely to drop out, new research conducted in B.C. has found.

Small schools — those with fewer than 300 students in an elementary and 700 in a high school — seem to be better all around, said Michele Schmidt, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and one of the researchers involved in the study.

The study, which looked at how school size affected students, parents and the community, show that students felt safer, attended school more religiously and were less likely to drop out.

Schmidt also found that students who didn't do well in a larger school setting showed significant improvements in their learning process once they moved to a smaller one.

"If they're taken out of that setting and put into a smaller school setting, even within a year, they'll reach the same levels of achievement as their peers in the other schools," Schmidt said in an interview with CBC News Friday. The study was conducted after the Coquitlam School Board decided in February to close five elementary schools to save money, because there were 2,500 fewer students last year than there were five years ago.

Schmidt said researchers were surprised by what they found.

"The results are actually quite dramatic for the students because of this sort of whole metaphor of a village raising a child, which begins to occur," she said.

Small classes also mean better working environment for teachers, she said.

Sleep vital for students, experts say
Last Updated: Monday, September 3, 2007 9:42 AM PT
The Canadian Press

Two new studies contribute to the body of research supporting the idea that getting enough rest helps children at school.

The research, released Saturday in the journal Sleep, is timely, as children try to get back into the school routine and their sleep patterns change as they adjust from late nights and leisurely mornings to earlier bedtimes and rise-and-shine wake-up calls.

Dr. Jacques Montplaisir of the Sleep Disorders Centre at Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal and his colleagues tracked close to 1,500 children from five months to six years of age, and their findings suggest that youngsters who got less sleep were more likely to have behavioural and cognitive problems in the classroom.

"The results of the paper highlight the importance of giving a child the opportunity to sleep at least 10 hours a night throughout childhood, especially before the age of 3½ years, to ensure optimal cognitive performance" in school, Montplaisir said in a statement.

And a study by Jan Van den Bulck in Leuven, Belgium, looked at teenagers — and found that the use of cellphones for calling and text messaging after lights out was prevalent. Only 38 per cent of the more than 1,600 teens studied said they never used their mobile phone after going to bed.
The study had several limitations — for instance, it relied on self-reported data — but suggests even moderate use of a cellphone after lights out raises the risk of long-term fatigue.

More sleep means better grades

Dr. Colin Shapiro of the Youthdale Child and Adolescent Sleep Clinic in Toronto has read these latest studies and was involved in research on Ontario high school students a few years ago that found that, with some exceptions, "the longer you sleep the better your grades."

"Sleep is not just a passive process, there are active things going on, you're metabolizing and putting out hormones and so on," Shapiro, a professor at the University of Toronto, said in an interview.

The Montreal study seems to fit with the growing literature that sleep is good for memory and good for brain growth, he said.

"They've shown that kids who have longer sleep have more cognitive skills, and so that probably means that one can infer that there's something about the sleep process that helps with cognitive development," he said.

"And so our attitude of making sleep expendable comes with a cost."

He called the cellphone study from Belgium "straightforward."

"One could have guessed that," he said of the after-bedtime phone calls and text messaging by teens. "They've documented it, but it's an important issue … you've got to recognize that sleep is a valuable part of life and you need to have a time that you're not disturbed in your sleep."

"Certainly having your cellphone as a potential disruptor because you have to be in touch with everyone all the time is a mistake. It's not going to lead to good function."

Chaya Kulkarni, a Toronto educator with the organization Invest in Kids, said the use of cellphones after lights out would be a concern for her as a parent.

"What's to stop a child from staying up until 2 in the morning, texting their friends, having nice long conversations …You have to have some rules in place," said Kulkarni, the mother of tweens aged nine and almost 12 who don't have cellphones.

Hard to get up earlier

As for back to school, Shapiro says it's relatively easy to allow one's sleep pattern to go later, but to move it earlier after a weekend or a summer vacation is not so easy.

"In some students they just power through it and they say 'OK I have to make that adaptation.' They become a little bit sleep-deprived and try and catch up with that sleep on the weekend."
However, some students can't do that and are late for school or, in extreme cases, don't get to school at all, he said.

"They're often accused of, for lack of a better expression, being bloody-minded — they want to just watch TV and be on their GameBoy and involved with e-mailing their friends and, as this one article suggests, phoning their friends late at night," he said.

"Although those are significant issues, for some of them it is simply biologically driven." He noted that "teenage monkeys go to bed late and get up late."

Change routine

Kulkarni says that for younger kids, even if a family hasn't started the transition to earlier school bedtimes, it's not too late.

"I think what's important here is that you establish a routine for bedtime with the children that is going to be workable for everybody with the start of school," Kulkarni advised. She also recommends a morning routine so that everyone can get out of the house on time.

"The adults in the family need to confer and need to say 'OK, what's every day going to look like, and who's doing what?"' she said.

"Sort out roles and responsibilities in terms of those morning and evening routines so that at the very least, on Tuesday or whenever the kids start, you're not sort of looking at each other going 'Oh, I thought you were doing that."'

Records of troubled B.C. students can be shared: privacy commissioner
Last Updated: Monday, September 3, 2007 12:20 PM PT
CBC News

Universities in British Columbia can share confidential medical records about troubled students if there's a perceived a threat to public safety, the province's privacy commissioner says.

Responding to a U.S. government report issued June 13 on the April 16 massacre at Virginia Tech that left 33 people dead — including the student who fired the gun — David Loukidelis said a university student's confidential medical records can be shared — regardless of the student's age.

"The laws in B.C. fully enable university and college officials to take steps to protect individual and indeed public safety," Loukidelis told CBC News on Monday.

The U.S. report says schools, doctors and police often do not share information about potentially dangerous students because they can't figure out complicated and overlapping privacy laws.
Loukidelis said there's a long list of exemptions in B.C.'s privacy laws that allow a student's private information to be shared for the good of public safety.

Tim Rahilly, senior director of student and community life at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, said he often noticed the beginning of problems with students and wondered whether that information could be shared.

He said the university would ask the student whether it can talk to the student's parents about the concerns.

"The student can say no and if they are above the age of majority we are a little bit hamstrung," Rahilly said.

Loukidelis said if a student denies a request to share personal information with their parents or school officials, an assessment can be made.