This rendering of Montgomery County high school students shows that they’re so tired that they can’t even properly dress themselves.

Back when I was a teenager, I’d walk at least a mile uphill in the snow to get to high school. At 4 a.m., no less. Sadly, students in Montgomery County seem to have gone soft over the years, because their parents are now demanding that high school start times be pushed back an hour, reports WAMU:

High schools currently start at 7:20 a.m., and 16-year-old Garret Mader says this means waking up at 5:45 a.m. and semi-sleep walking to the bus stop. And he’s not the only one who’s sleepy.

“My friends are all tired,” Mader says. “They’re all really tired, and they’re usually in about the same spot as me.”

Mandi Mader, Garret’s mother, started the petition. Two months later more than 10,000 have signed, asking for a start time of 8:20 a.m. Mader says many research studies have found a teenager’s body clock or circadian rhythm shifts forward, so they don’t feel sleepy until later at night.

“Their whole physiology is saying ‘sleep, sleep’ and they are trying to be at their desk alert and learning,” she says.

High schools in Montgomery County have started at 7:20 a.m. since 1993, though since 1998 county officials have discussed pushing that time back to afford students a little more shut-eye. (Start times are staggered between high, middle and elementary schools, with the latter starting latest.) Other local jurisdictions start high school later in the morning, between 8:30 a.m. in D.C. and 9 a.m. in Frederick County.

Advocates of pushing back the start times say that that students will be more attentive, will get in fewer traffic accidents on the way to school and will visit nurses and counselors less.

And no, I didn’t actually walk to school, much less in snow and certainly not at 4 a.m. My school started at 8 a.m., and I’d probably have been even more tired had it started 40 minutes earlier every day.