Daylight Savings: Is the Save Worth it?

Sunday, March 13 was daylight savings: an event where people adjust their clocks to be an hour forward so that there is more light in the evenings, however, there is also less light in the morning. It also causes people to lose an hour of time due to the jump from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. Its original purpose was to help farmers, but it is now heavily debated if we still need it.

Congress is even debating it if it should be kept or not. There are definitely pros and cons to both potential decisions; if daylight savings is kept, an hour is gained in the winter, but there will be less daylight later in the day. If we get rid of daylight savings, however, then it will be brighter in the winter evenings. 

A big part of daylight savings is losing an hour of sleep which is significant because it messes up people’s sleep schedules which can cause people to be drowsy or pay less attention.

Shalonda Holt, a Biology teacher at Centennial, when asked if her student’s attention span changed after daylight savings, responded, “I haven’t noticed a significant difference.”

It’s surprising that the decrease in daylight during the morning hasn’t made a big difference, which makes the whole point of fall back odd. 

Rena Middleton, a Senior at Centennial, was surveyed about her thoughts on daylight savings and when asked if we should keep daylight savings, said, “I like it being lighter until later because it feels like I have so much more time to do everything I want to.”

Some people in the survey prefer to wake up in the light and then have it get dark earlier. It can be difficult to wake up in the dark, but the brightness later can definitely be motivating.

Bri Pack, another senior at Centennial, had interesting thoughts on getting rid of daylight savings; “I grew up moving around because of the military, and now I have friends all over the USA as well as in different countries. It’s really hard to coordinate calls and make sure we aren’t messaging too late when each country changes their time on different days.”

Time zones also are an important factor of daylight savings, as daylight savings only increase the gap in times between different states and countries. Removing it would make time zones simpler and allow people such as Pack to communicate with others around the world easier.

Mimmi Kandadai, a freshman at Centennial, has mixed feelings about daylight savings; “it means we would have a regular time schedule and not lose an hour in the sleep but it’s really only annoying for the first day and the week following. After that, you get used to it and it feels normal.”

Kai Chen, a Senior at Centennial, wants daylight savings to stay. “We should because the sun is around longer by the evening,” he said.

It sounds like the daylight savings debate isn’t going away anytime soon. 

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