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Comment by mavhc | Hacker News Reader

AIUI teenagers in USA start school early so they can reuse the same school buses for younger children, it's a cost cutting measure most of all

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I agree that the proximal driver is cost cutting.

But it’s largely tolerated because of the widespread cultural belief that waking up early is “character-building”. As if a late-shifted chronotype is a sign of laziness and sloth.

Also so students are at school before parents need to be at work. School is child care for a lot of parents.

If our society took a chill pill with all the 'stranger danger' fear mongering, we could simply let kids walk themselves to school, as was once common not too long ago.

Where do you live that schools are still that close? some schools are up to 15 miles away from students.

America. I used to walk two miles to school when I was a kid. That school got torn down years ago, but was replaced with another on the same lot. It would be just as easy to walk today as it ever was; there hasn't been some fundamental change in how communities are laid out.

School buses still exist too. Kids in rural areas can stand at the end of their driveway and board a bus without parental supervision, provided their parents aren't totally paranoid.

Stranger danger happened because women in the suburbs went from being SAHM’s to working professionals. This turned the suburbs from villages (where there were plenty of adults around to keep an eye on everyone) to “bedroom communities” which are largely abandoned during the day.

It’s one thing to let your kids walk to and from school when you know there are lots of other parents around. It’s entirely another thing when you know the place is a ghost town until all the parents get off work and come back home.

How do you explain absence of stranger danger in non suburban communities and countries where women work? Women work not just in America and not just in middle class.

Read my reply again. I said it specifically applies to the suburbs. Non suburban communities are different. My comment does not apply to them.

Also sports! This is a big one, as high school sports are the lifeblood of many a small town. Ending school early lets kids cram in their 2+ hours of bashing each other's heads in for the amusement and profit of locals before they do 2+ hours of homework.

When I was on the swim team, we often had practice in the morning before class. If school started later, morning practice would be even easier (as it was, we were waking up at something like 5am for that.) And competitions can easily be on Saturdays, they needn't be after school on a weekday.

Based on the wording of the post, I'm ~95% sure they meant exclusively football, baseball, and basketball.

Those can be done the same way.

They can, but in my experience (especially at small rural schools), the sports I was talking about get the "good" practice times (after school).

Any other sport gets... whatever doesn't conflict with those.

I mean.. swimming didn't conflict with any other sport but diving, and swimming got precedence. We practiced in the morning because it was a good time for it.

I meant conflict with staff time.

At small schools, you're probably going to only have 1-3 members of staff qualified to train students (qualified is a very loose term here).

I suppose I could be mistaken about staffing conflicts. My small school didn't have a pool, so there really wasn't anything resembling any sort of water based sports (unless you just wanted to swim in a lake).

That is unrelated to the school schedule. Most bus drivers aren't going to care if their routes start at 6, 7 and 8am or 8, 9 and 10am.

There is also an issue of avoiding the 5pm rush hour when heading home.

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