When five Myers Park High School students decided to spend the 2025-26 school year studying teen sleep deprivation, they started out thinking small.
They had plenty of ideas about what contributed to the problem, and imagined tackling something they could change themselves. Maybe they could put together sleep kits for students, with blue-light-blocking glasses, nose strips and other inexpensive tools that might help teenagers get better rest.
But as the five students dug deeper, they concluded that the sleep kits wouldn’t make a big enough impact. Simply encouraging students to put away their phones or teaching them better sleep habits wouldn’t move the needle either…