Terra Ziporyn (NASW Member) and Amy Wolfson—Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start

Advance copy: Backstories on books by NASW members

EDUCATING THE EXHAUSTED:
ADOLESCENT SLEEP AND THE
STRUGGLE FOR A LATER SCHOOL START
Terra Ziporyn (NASW Member) and Amy R. Wolfson
Johns Hopkins University Press, July 14, 2026
Hardcover: $36.95, eBook: $36.95
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1421454894
eBook ISBN-13: ‎978-1421454900

Ziporyn reports:

Educating the Exhausted began with a question that had nagged at me for decades: why had 50 years of clear, consistent research on adolescent sleep done so little to change school hours that made healthy sleep virtually impossible?

As my co-author Amy Wolfson and I write in the introduction, school start times may seem mundane, yet they “touch on virtually every aspect of adolescent growth, development, health, safety, learning, and performance,” and provoke surprisingly intense reactions. Amy approached the issue as a sleep researcher who began studying adolescent circadian rhythms in the 1990s.

I came to it as a science writer, historian of medicine, and education advocate fueled by my kids’ 7:17 a.m. high school start time. Our perspectives were complementary—one grounded in sleep research, the other in the history of science and the messy realities of policymaking and science communication.

Once we recognized that the start-school-later movement was also a case study in how science informs policy, we began shaping the book. Our process was surprisingly smooth. We divvied up chapter drafts and then edited each other’s work—an arrangement that worked because our expertise overlapped just enough to enrich the narrative without stepping on each other’s toes.

A week-long writing retreat in Sedona gave us uninterrupted time to draft, revise, and fact-check. We also drew on research support from Amy’s students, as well as scientists, educators, health professionals, policymakers, and activists who shared stories otherwise lost to time.

As two women working in the trenches of science translation, we felt it was important to tell this story from that vantage point. Ours was just one of many stories of women playing pivotal roles in public-health activism, often outside formal power structures and involving the interplay of evidence, culture, and institutional inertia.

What most surprised me was how intellectually rich this seemingly simple topic turned out to be. A question that looked mundane opened a web of issues including biology, timekeeping, moral views about sleep, and the sociology of reform. My advice to other science writers: don’t underestimate small questions. They often reveal the biggest stories.

Contact info:

• Terra Ziporyn, 410-262-6616, terra@startschoollater.net
  • Ziporyn’s websites:
  • Terra Ziporyn
  • Start School Later
  • Blog: Start School Later Blog
  • Substack: Terra Ziporyn
  • Bluesky: Terra Ziporyn
  • Facebook: Start School Later
  • Instagram: Start School Later
  • LinkedIn: Start School Later
  • X: @terraziporyn
• Amy Wolfson, awolfson@loyola.edu
  • Wolfson’s website:
  • Amy R. Wolfson, Ph.D.
• Book: Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start
• Publicist: Alison Mailloux, 617-655-3371, alisonmailloux@jhu.edu

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