A very beaten dead-horse, but look at Japan:
Elementary Schools and Middle Schools placed within a MAXIMUM 10min walking pace distance at that age group’s walking pace.
High Schoolers able to commute to their school of choice due to robust public transportation network.
We have designed cities that create as byproducts incredible amount of self-inflicted wounds on our culture. We don’t have to live this way. This is a choice.
Parents go to work or send their kids off. A parent personally accompanying a student to school is an indicator of something having gone wrong.
Major US population centers who are not New York should have, at the start of their explosive population growth, experienced a massive construction boom. There should be so many people employed making a city right now that the other problem we have with people not making a living wage because they are working jobs that weren’t designed to be life-sustaining careers might not be a problem!
Tear down all the “historical homes” and build mid-sizes apartment buildings. Build more schools. Hire more teachers.
The “character” and “flavor” of a city will come naturally and organically as an emergent property of trying to build a massive city to house millions.
Cities if done right turn into quasi-perpetual motion machines that feed itself the economic activity to sustain itself. And because they are denser and more compact, resource consumption can be scaled to be more efficient. Oh and all the people who used to be sprawled out now concentrated? That frees up land to build industrial centers on the outskirts that feed more economic activity.
This is an oversimplification that ignores a LOT of externalities to economic activity and histories of urban decay, but essentially: yes cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles essentially need to be rebuilt from the ground up and hopefully it will be as a result of conscious decisions and not a Great Fire of London/Earthquake of 1906 type disaster.
The other problem is bureaucracy and that is actually a consequence of the way US regulations approach regulation. It will make everyone’s life easier if we had very perspective building regulations that can be just checklisted through instead of ambiguous, litigious wording.
Over time the city will grow denser and all other stuff like bike lanes and public transport will simply make sense.
Yes. Move away from car culture.
No, that's not needed. There is one first start that is relatively easy to do, and many cities are experimenting with it all over the world: ban individual-transportation cars, only allow taxis, ambulances, delivery services, tradespeople's / construction vehicles and transportation for the disabled. Then, use the space on the suddenly free roads to introduce a solid 24/7 bus network and return the space that's not needed any more to the public by building green stripes, bicycle lanes and pedestrian stripes.
It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop, also because your delivery area shrinks because your deliverymen use bicycles and won't drive uphill or more than 5 km from your place.
Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare. And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Not advocating for car culture, but failing to account for citizens' actual needs makes your city unliveable.
- Your lifestyle can adjust so that you don’t pick up two weeks of groceries at once and buy in bulk at Costco. You could walk to a fresh market instead. You can get a few days groceries at a time. Getting groceries doesn’t have to be the massive effort it is here in North America. Or there are small electric mobility options.
- Customers and parking. This doesn’t necessarily follow. If a street is very walkable and people use it frequently, people can easily notice a shop and walk in. That doesn’t really happen if you’re driving, as you don’t really interact with or see the outside world. So in theory, a vibrant walkable street can support a lot more local economic activity. Beyond that, the amount of land used for parking in North American suburbs is so vast that there is actually less economic activity because so much land is effectively sitting there empty. If a parking lot is as big as the store… well, that’s one more store that could exist!
Existing dense and ultra-dense cities do not face these problems or have adequately addressed them. Or these aren’t actually problems.
Increased density in a neighborhood means increased foot traffic which means increased business.
Delivery of large items become an essential business activity. The Japanese versions of many multinationals offer free, same-day delivery of any items bought in-store if you live within a 30 miles of the store. You actually can have it scheduled to have the delivery truck coincide with when you come home.
Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
Businesses respond to the limited range of their customers by increasing their presence. Look at New York — a bodega at every corner. Small businesses can thrive by filling a niche inside a walkable radius and have decreased marketing costs and higher customer discovery because tens of thousands will walk by every day. So large corporations create more jobs and independent mom-and-pops can reliably compete.
Denser cities don’t have your above problems because the nature of dense cities make all of those things moot. Ive seen many of these same counter arguments before, and my only thought is that Americans have lived in our current state for so long we fail to imagine a better life.
French cities are currently not getting denser because of perceived social problems such as poorer working population leading to low economic activity, poor academic performance and eventually and a rise of crime. Paris in particular concentrates a really-non-negligible fraction of the metropolitan area's economic activity but cannot become denser that it is right now because current regulation restricts high-rise buildings in the city proper [1]. That leads to inflated price which drive people away.
Same-day delivery? Good luck with that. 24h is the best they can do, and that's 79 euros -- by the way -- for your sofa that's being delivered to your home, when you'll be there (or not, lol). That being said, Japanese versions likely factor in the delivery cost.
> Why do you assume the delivery service will use bikes and not mopeds, small cars, or other powered mobility systems?
These exist, and there are even moving companies that use that as a selling point. Don't see how practical it is though, especially when driving uphill, as Paris is not exactly as flat as Amsterdam, Chicago or Miami, for example. Mopeds or cars still won't deliver more than 5 km away from their base, but customers can easily drive for 45 min to a good restaurant 20 km away.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A8glements_d%27urbanisme_...
Reading your response, I feel that France has its own set of cultural baggage and norms it must sort through.
>That being said, Japanese versions likely factor in the delivery cost
Not by much though. To the point where it’s still practically free.
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
The needs of a neighborhood's residents are distinct from and sometimes opposed to the needs of non-resident stakeholders such as suburban commuters, absentee landlords, and tourists. Ultimately I think every neighborhood needs to strike some balance between these stakeholders.
But the extent that most American cities prioritize the needs of commuters and visitors over their own residents has always seemed odd to me. For example, many cities spend huge sums of money destroying local neighborhoods to widen freeways so commuters can move further from the city. This results in a destroyed local tax base and increases in suburban property values.
All else being equal I would have expected most cities to operate like Paris and prioritize the needs of local residents above the needs of visitors.
The former case can be solved by either going shopping more regularly - or by making that possible in the first place by making sure there are grocery stores at regular walkable distances. If you have to use a car to transport your groceries or other regular (!) shopping, your community is underserved.
The latter case can be solved by regulating delivery services to have enough staff and technology (i.e. pallet trucks) to be able to haul all the furniture from the nearest delivery drop-off point.
> It's all fun and games until you find out that you can't have as many customers as you thought to because people can't find a parking spot near your shop
Objective data from Berlin's experiment shows that this concern is relatively unfounded - they looked at anonymized cellphone tower data to determine a sizable increase in pedestrian traffic for the shops [1]. For stores selling stuff that is not easily transportable without a car (e.g. kitchens), there should be incentives to move these to a new location that is accessible with cars or by delivery services.
> Paris is implementing this and if you live in the suburbs, going out to Paris is a logistic nightmare.
Well, they are learning. The important thing was to get started in the first place. Now with real-world experiences they can adapt and improve.
> And no, taxis won't always accept to drive you to your hometown with no night time bus service.
Again, the answer of this is government regulation. In Germany, taxis are mandated by law to serve you.
[1] https://efahrer.chip.de/news/friedrichstrasse-in-berlin-schm...
When the high is 110 F in a Phoenix suburb, you can’t ask the 14 year olds to skateboard 20 miles to school on a country road with no breakdown lane. Similarly, you can’t ask kids from Maine to skateboard to school in the dark on ice.
Whenever this topic gets brought up, a bunch of seemingly childless city dwellers think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.
It’s actually pretty simple: Both parents work. Somebody has to drive the kids to school (hard requirement — there’s no bus and a bike/skateboard is too perilous). Work starts at 9 am. School has to start earlier than that.
The problem that the US faces with respect to this issue is primarily caused the design of american cities (including the surrounding suburbs), which are laid out in a manner that makes the use of a car a practical necessity for getting anywhere. You wouldn't have to worry about a 20-mile country road to school out of a suburb if you instead made the sensible choice of placing services (like schools) right where they are needed, as european cities tend to do, instead of 20 miles away.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/finland/helsinki/climate https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/sioux-falls/climate
Yes our car-dependent infrastructure is an issue, but it's infrastructure we've built up for the better part of a century. Changing it will be slow and gradual, and in the meantime cold weather and darkness are issues in much of the country. Also hot weather in other parts of the country (heat stroke can be a serious concern in the Southwest)
The weather in Oulu during winter looks a lot like the weather in Sioux Falls, except there's a lot more precipitation (snow) in Oulu.
One statistic I've read for eastern South Dakota is that it's one of the worst states to live if you hate extreme cold and extreme heat as we have both - sometimes within a week of each other!
However, as a Canadian, some of what you say is just plain gibberish. My rural county, not province or country, but county, is on its own larger than some European countries, with a population of 20,000.
If you tried to put schools within even 10 miles of every kid, you'd end up with hundreds of one room schools, with a teacher teaching 4 kids.
The problem here is, there is no one size fits all. Trying to make suggestions needs to be more location specific.
Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.
I mean, come on, I've seen farms, just a single farm owned by one man in rural Manitobia, larger than massive cities!
Millions of acres of land, with just wheat and rye on it! Owned by a dude, presumably larger than some countries!
I am quite aware that what I mentioned is not feasible for some of the more rural regions that exist in the US and Canada. However, those constitute a rather small portion of the population. It is as you say; there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but certain solutions are so widely applicable that they could bring significant benefit to the lives of most americans and are thus worth pursuing (where relevant) even if they do not solve the challenges faced by the small number of people living in the more rural regions of these countries.
The Finnish municipality of Inari is over 17,000 sq.km, in the same ballpark as the entire country of Israel, with a population of 7,000. This gives it a density of 0.47 people/km2, four times less than Manitoba.
As to the local high school parking lot, that's not an "efficiency" thing - it's a "young people getting a taste of freedom" thing.
Also, how is "doubling the school's area and vastly increasing environmental damage" not an efficiency thing? Kids the world over get by without having to rely on cars to experience freedom. If your society requires people to drive multi-thousand dollar pollution machines to experience freedom, then it's not truly free.
It's worth noting that <hotter | colder> than the vast majority of the US isn't a particularly useful metric.
- The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the winter weather could be in an area where it's constantly below freezing and it's common to have over a foot of snow on the ground most of the time (ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow). - The people that say their kids can't walk to school because of the heat could be in an area where 110degree weather is common (somewhat less of an issue since most school doesn't happen in the hottest months; but there is summer school). - There are plenty of places in the US where the houses are so far apart that its not realistic to have a school that even moderately close to more than a couple of them.
Even if "most of the US" is more temperate than "some location where kids walk to school", there's still plenty of places where its considerably less reasonable to walk to school year round.
As a Finn, the first part is an infrastructure issue and you're building it wrong, and the second part is just plain old weird; snow on the ground doesn't make walking unsafe. Too much snow makes walking slower and more tiring, but that circles back to infrastructure, specifically snow plowing.
And walking on the road when the road has snow on it (so is slippery) IS dangerous if there's any amount of traffic. Even if you can stay to the side of the road (which is hard when there's a lot of snow), the risk of being hit is increased because cars can lose fine control under such conditions.
Americans don't like to admit certain things, and this is one of those. You shift blame from how your roads are built to things like weather.
From the grandparent:
> Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles.
They really are not the obstacles, so I'd ask you to not use them as excuses.
So yes, because of the way the roads, towns, and cars exist today, it is not reasonable to have kids walk to school in many cases. The weather conditions for the area are one of the things that go into that calculation; they are one of the obstacles that add up to it not being realistic. Are they the root cause? No. But it's irrelevant, because they _are_ one of the factors involved in outcome. If the weather was always perfect, then those children could walk to school year round. If dedicated walking paths were created that cars could not travel on were created, then those children could walk to school year round. Neither one of those is going to happen.
> It's not the snow that is dangerous, it's the cars.
Pretending it's realistic to magic all the car focused town layouts away is completely and utterly unrealistic, so I'd ask you to not pretend that "if we just admitted cars were the problem, all the problems would go away".
Meanwhile, this subthread started at
> Heat, cold, darkness, lack of infrastructure, and distance.
If you don't think poor civic planning is at fault, you'll never fix it.
We aren't going to completely redesign all of America's cities for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep though, so the point is irrelevant.
That is quite the hyperbole.
>for the purpose of making sure teens get a bit more sleep
Add to that the time and resources wasted by millions of parents daily driving around instead of doing something economically productive, something that keeps them healthier, or just anything that doesn't cause environmental damage. And the fact that this is just one small instance of a much bigger issue affecting most people (anyone regularly commuting or using services within or near cities) to some degree. It's obviously not the most important issue out there right now, but it is a whole lot of wasted time and effort that could be eliminated, and you could probably even do it gradually without implementing any sudden sweeping changes.
It is really not. The topic is a legal change in california to change when school starts.
And to respond to this fairly minor topic by suggesting that cities be rebuilt is absurd.
I am going to say that there are more immediate solutions to kids getting enough sleep, due to school starting times, than "Well just redesign all our cities to be more like europe!"
Redesigning entire cities is hard. It is not a reasonable thing to bring up, when talking about a policy regarding when school starts.
That is not hyperbole. Instead it is completely legitimate to dismiss someone suggesting that cities are designed poorly, because to fix such a problem would be a huge undertaking.
The health benefits far exceed just sleep.
But I think it would take more than 100 years to change this, and most importantly, many in the US are not interested in such a change whatsoever.
No need to nuke LA and rebuild, just take a few plots in the middle and put a school in there.
At the very least, for most towns, you're looking at moving a bunch of roads around. For many of them, you'd need to add more schools to keep the distances reasonable. I expect, for a large number of the town, the term "complete redesign" is a reasonable description.
Alternatively, and this may be a radical idea: If your town is five kilometers across, with a uniform distribution of population: Why not have two, or three smaller schools, evenly distributed? A similar-sized German city (taking Öhringen, ~25.000 citizens, which also follows the 'almost a circle' rule, as an example here) has six highschools (which also take in students from neighboring villages)...
Money. A lot of it would be required.
[0] Would need to provide more stops and ideally a better more consistent schedule so kids could get there just in time for the bus. Also for hot weather school picks up in the morning so even the hottest places aren't 110+ at pickup time.
These also aren't weird, aspirational goals that have never been done before, there are plenty of places where public transport is good enough even in rural areas so that kids can actually get to school. The areas so sparsely populated that that's impossible are...not the majority, to put it mildly.
There are plenty of companies with flexible working hours, and large open-source programming projects with completely asynchronous workflows.
Now yes, there are some valid reasons for a business, such as a shop or restaurant, to have certain opening hours - for most shops, being open during the day and at similar times to other shops (to increase chances that a customer who comes to buy something from one shop will be drawn into the shop next door) is ideal.
However, there is no valid economic reason that I can discern for the vast majority of businesses and the school system to keep blindly imitating 19th century factories in their work hours.
In some cases, it's more a concern of economically _viable_. Sometimes, the fact that something would cost more means it's not possible. We have teachers that have to pay for the children's school supplies out of their own pockets, because the school system doesn't get enough money.
For longer distances it’s really not a big deal to bike to school. No one needs to be dropped off by their parents, unless they live out of district and chose to go to a school other than their local one. And even in that situation, many schools open a half hour or more early, where kids can be in the library or cafeteria well before class starts.
In the winter wearing a trench coat, a dr. who scarf, and beetle-eye mirrored sunglasses so my eyes didn't freeze.
If my parents had time, they'd drive me to the end of the road and let me sit in the car, or if i was lucky drive me to school (allowing me to sleep in more)
> Somebody has to drive the kids to school (hard requirement — there’s no bus and a bike/skateboard is too perilous)
I don't agree with the assessment that there's no bus. If there *really* isn't, change that.
In general: adjust society to make more sense. We know teens have higher sleep requirements. Meet their needs. Find solutions. Work environments can adjust, even if they don't like it.
Maybe well rested teens will be less likely to shoot up the school shrug
Just some quick results from a google search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528821/
https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/tee...
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/features/students-sleep.h...
And more research will be produced showing that teen clocks are also offset, but it's still the case that I have all my anecdata about what it feels to be tired, to get enough sleep etc., and what it feels like to be a teen rebelling against any rules.
hunter gatherer teens did not sleep late every morning, they had to get up just like everybody else, probably at the crack of dawn
And then people say that all the work they do is for the benefit of their children...
And then people say that those against mandatory school attendance are crazy...
80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas [1] and the average school commute distance for high schoolers is (or, was, can't find a recent number) 6 miles [2].
FWIW, I lived a little under 5 miles from school in a non-bike-friendly suburb and managed to transport myself to and from school just fine without a car. We had 100 degree days in the summer, but we also had... summer break. Maybe one hot week in August, but nothing I would call dangerous.
The "20 miles down a county road" scenario is an outlier. If that is representative of your community, then the school policies of your community (including start time) should reflect that reality. The 80+% rest of us are having a different conversation about a different place. No reason to get angry about it.
> city dwellers
Far more Americans live in metro areas than in nonmetro rural areas.
> childless
The vast majority of American children do not live in rural areas. Rural areas are, on average, old and managing to get older.
> think they’re making some massive revelation suggesting that kids just get their own butts to school at a comfortable 10:30 am.
The California law requires a start time no earlier than 8:30am, which is already several hours later than 10:30.
When I was in high school our start time was 7am or something like that, but there were "negative hours" so you could show up as early as 6am. There was cold breakfast in the cafeteria with a staff member present, or you could go to some classrooms for tutoring (I think one per core subject). Hazy on the exacty details -- it was a long time ago -- but I do remember the doors were unlocked 1 hour before classes started and you could either hang out or get tutoring.
Starting -1 hour at 7:30am gives a parent 1.5 hours to commute from school to their job by 9am.
--
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
There are a lot of solutions that don't require school starting before 9 am.
Also, while you may be correct about it affecting a huge area of the US, it doesn't affect many children in the US. Precisely because it's a problem with low density. Maybe the true simple solution is that rural children all telecommute and do teleschool.
at 14 i biked along county roads to get to the hippy school, approx 14 miles.
both my parents worked. i am not a city dweller. kids can absolutely get themselves to and from school and doing so at 9:00 or 10:00 will mean safer roads with less ice and less traffic. if school started at 10:00, snow days would virtually be a thing of the past. skateboards have a lower fatality & injury rate than bikes(mostly due to the inherently lower speeds involved), although they have limitations for long distance transport and offer no luggage capacity.
Aren’t school districts required to offer busing to rural communities? That’s the way it was done in PA.
Granted, that doesn’t fix the sleeping in issue since we had to catch the bus pretty early.
Let work start later too. Tell that boss he can get with the times.
My workplace starts at 06:00 or 07:00 depending on how much work is on, there are no other options.
Lmao how do people talk like this with a straight face.
I do not agree with that - but it's the current law, so we can't just leave out early teenagers alone and run to work.
I too was and am a late sleeper and school mornings were torture. Just saying there is indeed a big dependency between work starting times and school starting times - though that can be solved with optional school child care rather than mandatory early classes.
That's a horrible law and I sure hope there are no states with a similar one!
Note, a state that does NOT have such a law is not necessarily a better one - It leaves the decision up to either various criteria (which may be well or poorly defined, subjective or objective), or opinion/assessment of jury/judge/child protection services. And in a state that does have a law with age such as 8 or 9, does not mean you are absolved of responsibility for leaving a 12 year old home. Ultimately, this is a tricky subject that's hard to objectively measure and decide.
What it comes down to is that times/culture have changed. I walked to school on a non-trivial path when I was 6 years old in grade 1; it was about a kilometer, crossed couple of busy intersections and a bridge. So did all of my classmates. But that was in Bosnia in the 80's. Today, in Canada, a 6 year old walking to school unsupervised for 15-20 minutes, in summer and winter? Largely a complete no-go. Multiple neighbours and observers would report it to police - and this is not an opinion, this is local newspapers articles.
To the latter part though - "ensure their autonomy is respected within local community" - unless you started right now and are heavily involved in politics, local school boards, local bylaws, etc... you may find that WAY harder than you think. Culture shift is right - it's not about talking to your 3 neighbours. In the use case of walking to school - it's every neighbour on the way from home to school plus every teacher and school official plus parents of all the kids in the class plus any bystander, jogger, passerby, driver etc who may see your kid alone on the street. The news articles I've seen locally are rarely about the next door neighbour - frequently it's some self-appointed good-samaritan stranger who took it upon themselves to call police or lodge a complaint; or a school counselor etc.
That's great, congratulations and keep it up!
> To the latter part though
You're right. I certainly didn't mean to imply that I would necessarily be entirely successful. I'm keenly aware of how challenging it is to shift social consensus in even very small groups, let alone larger ones.
I understand that it would be scary to go through such a high consequence interaction as having the police called on you for your good parenting choices, but do you have any sense of what the outcome has typically been in those cases where someone complains?
i.e. do the police typically tend to side with the parent or the busybody paternalist?
When I imagine what a 25 mile dangerous bike ride looks like here, it's living 25 miles out in a place where the US highway is the only route to town. But there's a high school out there, so it wouldn't be 25 miles.
Obviously other situations will exist, but living 20 miles from the school you attend is a corner case and will often be driven by choices the parents are making.
(It also applies to other extracurricular sports, but I doubt anyone really worries about play practice schedules)
You can’t really play soccer after dusk if the field is outside and you don’t have lights. So lots of outdoor sports have strict daylight constraints.
At some point you have to decide on an optimum between time, sleep, and output.
I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that did not have a gym period, but required all students to play an organized sport.
Gym in large high schools is a waste of time due to the student to instructor ratio. One frustrated gym teacher to 50+ kids playing dodgeball? Of course you’re going to have theater kids just going through the motions and goth kids behind the bleachers smoking cigarettes. It’s not real exercise.
You need small rosters, organized practices, uniforms, referees, fans (students and parents) and intra-school competition. It creates seriousness and expectations. You can’t hide from your coach when there’s only 14 kids on the roster. You need to do the sprints with everyone else and take the drills seriously.
I don’t think this scales beyond smaller high schools. Not enough facilities, not enough coaches, not enough money.
The important thing is that they get exercise of some kind. Maybe just allow them to choose whatever form of exercise they want as long as they do something each day?
The school could offer sports but also allow them to walk, run, lift weights (when old enough), play tag, do yoga, or whatever they prefer.
If a kid truly hates all exercise and refuses to cooperate, I guess there’s only so much you can do, but you could at least remove as much friction as possible and try to meet them where they are. Anything that gets them moving will offer huge physical and mental benefits over just slouching in shitty plastic chairs all day.
Lots of schools have an in-school trained nurse.
>create meal plans
Most schools in the US sell/provide subsidized lunch.
So yeah, there ISN’T much of a line here in the US. The school is daycare, education, basic medical attention, a cafeteria/food welfare program, and sports/after school program all rolled into one.
During early COVID in the Bay Area, the middle school in my neighborhood kept “serving” lunch. That is to say, it was too “dangerous” to hold class. However, they still staffed cafeteria staff and had a line down the street at lunch time of kids with subsidized/free lunch, and they handed out brown paper bags. So the school was literally operating ONLY as a child nutritional welfare program for a while, but not as a school.
I do think it’s a bit brutal and unnatural to make kids sit in classrooms all day in uncomfortable chairs under fluorescent lights with no time outside and no time for physical activity.
Afaik lots of schools in the US do facilitate physical exams by a doctor. I remember having one in middle school. It was the subject of much discussion among the boys in my class at the time since it involved a female doctor and a hernia check...
As someone who only took part in high school sports for the exercise, I was really frustrated that I went through 10+ years of education without really being taught anything about the realities of what's required to achieve and maintain lifelong fitness.
I would have been happy to join a "cardio and weight training team" because I frankly didn't give a fuck about wrestling or football, especially since those programs focused most of their effort on the well-being of the top-performing players anyway.
I don't know that "too late" has much meaning here.
Well, except when they have to get out the door before 6:15am...
Any parent that wants to torture their kid with a 7am start is free to do so.
That choice however shoulsnt dictate the school time for everyone else.
Early birds can show up to a long recess pre-class time but class should only start at 10am or so
A two hour period from waking to being in first period seemed pretty normal, and even if you subtract that from a “more generous” 9am, you still get 7am, which is pretty brutal on adolescents which are known to have shifted sleep schedules.
That is also, I think, an abnormally long bus trip, but maybe that's my bias.
I had a very similar schedule to the person you're responding to, except our high school started at 7:25. I'd take a little extra time in the morning just to get my head together before going to school.
So maybe not typical but definitely believable for me. There are probably some kids in almost every district that have to get on the bus an hour before school starts.
* be really tired (5 min)
* take shower (10)
* get dressed (5)
* eat breakfast (10)
* walk to bus stop (takes 15-20 min, sometimes my parents would drive me)
* buffer
Assuming you can fall asleep at midnight, sure.
I’m one of those people who normally can’t fall asleep before midnight and struggles to wake up early, but I’ve done a few digital detox programs where I’m without any electronic devices, and I’m always amazed at how quickly I fall into a schedule where I’m asleep before 9 and waking up at 4:30. And it’s also amazing how much better I feel both mentally and physically when I’m on that schedule.
If you assume 8 hours per day for school, maybe one extra to get to/from school then homework and house chores, how much time does that leave for entertainment?
No wonder kids stay up until very late because that's the only time they actually have for themselves to do something they actually enjoy and is not being forced upon them.
It certainly was given the default sleep schedule I had as a teen.
> Go to sleep by midnight
This wasn't something I could intentionally choose to do as a teenager without the use of drugs like melatonin.