Two parents are petitioning the Issaquah School District to explore what would be required to begin middle and high school academic days at 8:30 a.m. or later in the morning, in order to accommodate teens’ changing sleep needs.

The online MoveOn.org petition was posted April 1 and collected more than 1,500 signatures as of the last week of April — as well as supportive comments, like “Witnessing this need firsthand. Please approve!!,” and “As someone attending Issaquah High next year, I need this.”

Dea Barnett, a child psychiatrist and mother to two teen boys in the district, started the petition with Allison May.

It’s all based in the science of sleep and how children’s circadian rhythms change once they reach adolescence, Barnett said. While preadolescent children tend to do fine under the dictum “early to bed, early to rise,” the onset of puberty pushes their internal clock roughly two hours ahead, delaying the desire to sleep to as late as midnight. Combine a later natural bedtime with an early school start time — Issaquah High School, for example, begins first period at 7:25 a.m. every weekday except Wednesday — and you have a recipe for chronically tired teens.

Through her training, Barnett said she’s known about the adverse effects of sleep deprivation for years, including reduced ability to concentrate, greater susceptibility to health problems such as obesity and — perhaps most familiar to parents — emotional irritability.

“You can tell they get burned out,” Barnett said of her own sons. “When the weekend comes they want to sleep in to one in the afternoon to catch up. But the problem with that kind of sleep pattern is it fosters insomnia.”

Since last year, Barnett has periodically attended school board meetings to champion the cause of her chapter of Start School Later, a national nonprofit that, as the name suggests, lobbies for later school start times.

In August, PEDIATRICS, a journal published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, published a policy statement supporting a school start time later than 8:30 a.m. The statement claimed links between sleep deprivation and obesity, depression, academic performance, low quality of life and a higher risk for drowsy driving crashes.

However, implementing later school start times is complicated. Shifting the school day affects day-to-day operations such as employee scheduling and bussing.

The superintendents of neighboring Mercer Island School District and Bellevue School District launched a steering committee in December to explore the factors involved in starting school later. At a recent meeting of that committee, Mercer Island administrator Todd Kelsay noted that after school activities could present a conundrum: A later school day means later meetings for after school groups, potentially negating the possibility of students getting more sleep.

Barnett said she hopes districts from out of state that have already or have scheduled initiatives to start school later will provide a guidepost for districts at home. She is paying particular attention to Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, which voted to begin 8 a.m. start times beginning next school year. That district enrolls more than 186,000 students and has a large transportation network.

“If they can do it, we can,” she said.

The Issaquah chapter of Start School Later plans to present its petition at the May 13 meeting of the school board. The petition has set a goal of 2,000 signatures before that date.

Issaquah School District spokesperson L Michelle said this is an issue the district has been looking at on for years.

“We are open to re-examining this issue, but it is important to recognize that it is not an easy change to make and there are high costs associated,” she wrote in an email. “The major obstacle is transportation and the expense of eliminating our multi-tiered bus system, which saves taxpayers millions of dollars each year. …

“It is a very complicated issue,” she wrote.