Garbucks

We’ll have our Sweet Sixteen picks for you by Thursday afternoon, with our Elite Eight picks to follow this weekend. Astute Cleveland Frowns commenter Ben correctly notes below that “bettors would . . . be up” if they had played our NCAA picks so far.

Until the Tourney starts back up, we have for you this uplifting story about a coffee shop operated by special-ed students at Akron’s Garfield High School, Garbucks. Garfield is the alma mater of Buckeye football star, Chris “Beanie” Wells; former Buckeye football star and current Minnesota Viking, Antoine Winfield; and loyal Cleveland Frowns grandmother and duly canonized Saint, Grandma Christine, a.k.a. Grandma.

We appreciate the efficiency of a solution that satisfies both the need for good coffee at Garfield, and the provision of practical education for special needs students, but we can’t help but wonder about the Garfield students who drink the coffee served at Garbucks. Specifically, we can’t help but note that the increased demand for coffee in high schools is a symptom of the societal illness that is the perpetual sleep deprivation of our nation’s high school and junior high students.

Stephen Moore makes a good case in the 9/1/06 Wall Street Journal: “As a father of two teenage boys, I can attest to the fact that the single greatest teen crisis in America is not drugs, alcohol, smoking or early sexual activity, but sleep deprivation. . . . The National Sleep Foundation finds that teens now average between 6.5 and seven hours of uninterrupted sleep on a weeknight and only one in five gets the recommended nine hours. . . . Studies show that spurting growth hormones in teens alter their circadian rhythm and naturally turn them into night owls, physiologically uninterested in 9:30 p.m. bedtimes and fiercely opposed to 6:15 a.m. wake-up calls. . . . Amy Wolfson, a professor at Holy Cross who studies Americans’ sleep patterns tells me: ‘The evidence is pretty clear that students in the later starting schools get more sleep and have less tardiness, fewer behavior problems, and do somewhat better in school.’” And we wonder why most teenagers are such jerks. Read the whole thing here.

As home schooled students continue to run circles around the rest with respect to academic performance, and with movements such as the one described in Moore’s piece, we are confident that we will soon enough see a wholesale restructuring of the American educational “workday” so that, whatever else, it will allow students to get more sleep.

Until then, if we’re not going to let the kids sleep, we might as well make sure they have decent coffee. And once the problem of teen sleep deprivation is fixed? They could turn Garbucks into a gourmet salad bar. GarFields of Green?