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Comment by D13Fd | Hacker News Reader

Because it make zero sense for everyone to have to get up an hour earlier. And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning.

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There is also a movement to start school later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start_school_later_movement

For example, in California, starting this Fall, high school can't start before 8:30 AM.

I get the feeling that it's fairly common in US schools to have kids in before 8am, possibly even before 7am!

Is this because of the widespread school transport and the need to stagger the bus usage? In the UK it's quite rare to have school transport, with most kids at high school taking public transport, and at primary school either walking or being driven

I got the feeling from German textbooks at school that early starts were common in Europe too.

Early school hours are often a result of teachers' desires to get out of work early. Many teachers' unions include school hours in their bargaining/contracts.

Yeah, and that is because being a teacher is not just an incredibly mentally taxing job (made worse by the fact that class sizes are way too large) but also involves an awful lot of invisible after-school work: preparing and correcting exams, preparing class material, dealing with IEPs, following up with parents (particularly in financially or otherwise challenged families), organizing after-school and extra-curricular activities, dealing with other bureaucratic bullshit because the administration is understaffed...

Yes, it is commonplace for bussing to be staggered -- they often pick up a route for one school (maybe a high school), then run another route for another school (maybe an elementary school).

I'm sure parents with jobs are going to love this.

They will if it makes their kids healthier and puts pressure on industries to shift job schedules later.

But, we do that anyway. Mid winter, even in the south part of the U.S. I was standing in the dark and cold waiting for a bus to arrive.

Stop letting facts get in the way of a good "i dislike change" argument.

This isn't a constructive way of arguing, it's an irrefutable strawman

There is a big difference between doing it for a few weeks and doing it for most or all of the school year (depending on location and schedule).

Same here when I was in middle school. I never understood the standing for bus in the dark argument. I thought that was just normal.

"And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning."

I mean, coats exist. We could make sure everyone has winter wear appropriate for the weather, and then it just won't be an issue. Kids here are out in it and are from a young age here (Norway).

Easy to say from a low-crime, high-safety country like Norway.

Are we still pushing the myth of an epidemic of kids in the states getting abducted by random strangers?

It's easy to focus on abductions and forget all of the other relevant crime, which makes up the majority of it.

Yes abductions are low, but in many many areas crime as a whole is high, and children are often involved or impacted, and likely more so when they are stuck standing around in the dark.

After school crime involving children is much more prevalent. Imagine how darkness might currently aid that:

https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/offenders/qa03301.asp

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/after-school-the-prime-t...

I'm from the US - the midwest. It wasn't a big deal catching the bus when it was cold/dark there, either. We had lights at the bus stops, and half the time it was in front of the house. No big deal. We had coats, too. There are multiple programs to make sure kids have coats in the US, though they don't go far enough.

Most places in the US are pretty safe, by the way, though folks will swear they aren't.

Also a country where a high percentage of families can afford clothing of adequate quality.

Winter coats aren't so expensive that the people of Detroit are seriously lacking for them.

Sure they can't all stand at the bus stop wearing some status symbol of a jacket but they do just fine.

When I was in school, there were absolutely kids who lacked basic necessities, including quality clothing. Clothing was also more expensive back then... but universal schooling means that we're also catering to the poorest of the poor.

These damn socialists ...

Kids shouldn't be forced to start that early anyway. It's borderline child abuse imo. Maybe permanent DST will lead to school schedules that benefit children not adults.

YES! I work from 9-5. My kid is at school from 7:15 to 2:30. We're lucky my wife teaches so we don't have to worry about after school care.

It's actually the exact opposite. Permanent DST means that kids will be starting 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is terrible for educational outcomes.

It's already bad. The issue isn't when you sleep up relative to the sun, but relative to your responsibilities. Some kids have to wake up before 6am not to keep up, which severely limits their options in the evenings and their phyiscal development.

*to keep up

Change school start timings in winter, then?

We'd have to change work timing too, then, to facilitate dropoffs and parents who want to watch their kids at the bus stops. And at that point, we are back where we started. Better to just not mess with the time, and stick with standard time.

It's probably easier to change work timings now than it ever would have been before. Which is great.

If you change what time people go to work from 8 am to 9 am then you will also be changing when they get home from 5pm to 6pm. Then you have lost that extra daylight in the evening, which was the entire point of the time change!

Changing the start time for some activities twice a year seems likely to cause even more confusion that changing the clock

> And at that point, we are back where we started.

Except only for people at latitudes where it's worth doing. Those people are precisely where they started, and everyone else has a much simpler year-round standard time.

What percentage of the population must start work at exactly 8am?

A pretty big chunk. I couldn't find the latest Census data, but in 2000 ~20% of people left for work before 630 and 72% left for work before 830 am.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/2000/...

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