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A group of Richard Montgomery High School students intends to ask the county school board to reconsider later start times for high schools, opening up an issue that has been studied twice by the school system within the last decade.

The students participated in a summer internship sponsored by Howard University professor Linda Berg-Cross, a clinical psychologist specializing in sleep disorders, in which they studied the effects of sleep deprivation on teenagers and offered potential solutions.

While some students composed music or wrote recipes for bedtime-friendly snacks, two formed a petition to push back school start times by one hour.

"We thought just by starting school an hour later, it would make a big difference to students," said Josh Rothman, a 16-year-old Rockville senior who co-authored the petition with senior Rajarshi Chattopadhyay.

The students are proposing to start high school classes at 8:25 a.m., middle school at 8:55 a.m. and elementary at either 9:50 a.m. or 10:15 a.m.

But county Board of Education Vice President Patricia O'Neill (Dist 3) of Bethesda said starting school later has been discussed twice since 1998 and it has been found that there are too many problems with making the switch, including extra costs for the school system.

She said the school board would keep an open mind about the latest proposal, but suspects the challenges to changing start times a decade ago would arise again.

According to the National Sleep Foundation Web site, adolescents 11 to 17 years old should sleep 8.5 to 9.25 hours per night to be well rested during the day, but one study found that only 15 percent reported sleeping 8.5 hours on schools nights. Research has also shown that most teens have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m., according to the Web site.

Berg-Cross said sleep deprivation is "probably the largest health problem facing teenagers in Montgomery County and the nation," but it receives little attention. It can lead to an increased chance of developing diabetes, becoming obese and other health problems, she said.

Chattopadhyay, a 17-year-old Rockville resident, said he and Rothman want to collect more signatures before they present their petition to the Board of Education. As of early Tuesday afternoon, the petition had more than 360 online signatures.

The Parents Coalition of Montgomery County, an online group of education advocates, has posted a video from the students and a link to the petition on its blog at the students' request, but it has not issued an opinion on the proposal.

"We haven't taken a position one way or the other," Janis Sartucci, a member of the Parents Coalition, said Monday. "We just put it out there this morning and will let people decide for themselves."

Rothman, whose petition is also posted on mocosleeps.org, a Web site he and his classmates created to share their knowledge, said he and his friends could benefit from an additional hour of sleep. On average, Rothman said, he gets five to seven hours of sleep each night during the school year.

"That's really not enough to feel well rested," he said. "I'm tired in the morning and I have to drink coffee to stay awake. I also feel tired later in the day and I just know the amount of sleep that I get is not enough to feel my best."

But O'Neill said while teenagers might want later start times, granting them could create a domino effect of challenges.

"We have to look at how this would impact all 140,000 students, not just the high school kids," she said.

A little over a decade ago, Montgomery County Public Schools put together workgroups of staff, parents and students to look into the issue, but it was decided that starting school later for teens would be "too complicated and expensive," O'Neill said.

She said the problems ranged from increased transportation costs to high-schoolers getting home too late to watch younger siblings.

The school board even went so far as to offer a pilot program in 1998 that would have allowed high school students in participating clusters to have the option of starting school at either 7:25 a.m. or 9:15 a.m., but no clusters volunteered, O'Neill said.

Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia came close to adjusting its start times for the upcoming school year, but a majority of its school board voted against the proposal in March, said Mary Shaw, a Fairfax schools spokeswoman.

She said the decision stemmed from parent opposition and other complications that would arise if start times were adjusted.

If the proposal had passed, elementary school students would have gone to school first, followed by high school and then middle school students.

Chattopadhyay said he knows it would be difficult to implement later start times, but hopes the school system will at least consider their ideas.

"We're seen more counties around the country doing this and the results are positive and really speak for themselves," he said.