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Comment by munchenphile | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, sorry. That doesn’t work in a huge percentage of areas in the US. Heat, cold, darkness, lack of infrastructure, and distance.

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.

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Cold weather and darkness are not obstacles. Here in Finland the winters are darker, colder, and longer than in the vast majority of the US, yet even elementary schoolers usually go to school by themselves, often by foot or on a bike, sometimes by taking a bus or a train.

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.

You'd be surprised. Note that Sioux Falls, the capital of South Dakota, has substantially lower average lows in Winter than Helsinki.

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)

Pierre is the capital of South Dakota - though Sioux Falls is the largest city.

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!

Helsinki is one of the Southern-most cities of Finland situated on the edge of a large body of water. Instead, take a look at this Not Just Bikes video covering biking in Finland during winter: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

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.

Laughs in Northern Canadian

The video linked in the post you're replying to is by a Canadian and compares Oulu with Canadian policies.

Sioux Falls is the biggest city in South Dakota, not the capital city. The capital city is Pierre, SD.

Doh! Yeah that was a brain fart...

Some of what you say in your second part makes sense, although it has absolutely no bearing, nor is it a counter argument to the post you are replying to. It certainly doesn't refute the parent poster's statements about now, today, right now, instead, at best, maybe over 30 years, change could slowly be enacted.

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!

My comment was not an attempt to refute the entirety of what the parent comment stated (since I agree with most of it), merely a response to a tangential aspect of it.

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.

> Because when someone starts talking about rural living in the US and Canada, Finnish experience has no parallel.

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.

Average population density can be misleading, especially if all 7,000 of those people basically live in one town.

They don't. But for what it's worth, basically all Manitobans live in Winnipeg.

Ok, maybe it is partly caused by the design of cities.

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.

>completely redesign

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.

> That is quite the hyperbole.

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!"

Actually, there's even a name for that kind of hyperbolic misrepresentation of what someone else was saying so you can pretend their argument wasn't even valid.

Suggesting that cities aren't designed correctly is obviously implying that the solution is to redesign cities.

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.

I agree with the "redesign all cities" goal, even as hyperbolically stated.

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 for a complete redesign. Further up, it was suggested to put the schools near to where the students are - in the suburbs. That's a common sense policy Europe does naturally, and which everyone who spent some time playing SimCity (or the likes) understands.

No need to nuke LA and rebuild, just take a few plots in the middle and put a school in there.

This seems to not take into account the size of towns. For example, the one I live in is ~23.5 sq miles. If you put the schools in the center, you're looking at approximately a 2.5 mile walk each way for the children on the outskirts (the town isn't perfectly round, but close enough). And even that is assuming there's a direct "as the crow flies" path; which there certainly isn't.

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.

Hm, 2.5 miles are 4 kilometers - perfectly walk- and bikeable. Any teenager easily can do that, over here, they would. I do not see the issue, especially since it will not hit everyone.

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)...

> Why not have two, or three smaller schools, evenly distributed?

Money. A lot of it would be required.

I'd argue: money well spend. Also, smaller schools usually perform better when it comes to student success.

No, the problem isn't suburbs. Those are densely packed enough that a bus picks kids up. It's rural areas that don't have mass transport, which makes sense.

Suburbs are not densely packed. Picking up kids in a school bus would require over an hour, even in the small suburb that I live in. Rather, everybody either drives to school or is dropped off there: the parking lot of the high school is the same square footage as the school itself (excluding the football field).

Then you probably either (a) really live a rural area/exurb or (b) don't understand that they can operate more than one bus or (c) live in one of the areas that has had local government intentionally killing off bus service.

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.

I live in a Bay Area suburb that is decidedly not rural.

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.

> the vast majority of the US

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.

> ie, there is ONLY the road to walk on, and it's unsafe because of the snow

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.

Solving the infrastructure problem is extremely costly. Sure it can be done, but that means someone else doesn't get done. You have to pick your battles.

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.

It's not the snow that is dangerous, it's the cars.

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.

The roads are already built, and the towns are already laid out in ways that require cars. Arguing that the roads, towns, and cars could be changed so that walking to school is reasonable... while technically true, is not particularly useful in anything but the very long term. There isn't the money to do that.

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".

The process isn't quick, but I don't think anyone has claimed it to be.

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.

House keys and a bus though could work though for 90%+ of kids even in places with extreme weather [0] and you could have pre-school programs for the 10% that can't either because their too far for bussing or can't get themselves to the bus, eg those with assorted disabilities. You're right though the school start time is tied to it's function as free daycare for children so parents can work, COVID proved that is a critical part of schooling for the modern economy.

[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.

Why is it that we can radically transform human society in the first place, but we simply cannot design our cities and schools and work days to just let teenagers sleep in a bit more? There's absolutely nothing immutable here and these are all problems that can be solved. Why can't workdays be vastly more flexible for parents? Why can't public transport be vastly superior to allow teenagers to get to school whenever needed?

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.

Because it's not economically beneficial, or atleast no one's made it economically beneficial yet. Because obviously teenagers wellbeing << money

> economically beneficial

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.

Which happens because schools don't matter as much to the people in charge as the military-industrial complex, it's a self fulfilling prophecy..

I disagree with this, I think it's just a force of habit, where outdated industrial era behavioral patterns keep propagating themselves because no one takes the time to rethink them.

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.

Why does no one take the time? Because they don't get paid for it. The root cause of almost everything is "I made more money that way". I remember reading that Feynman tried to work on an education board, but gave up because of corruption, lobbying and no one really caring about learning outcomes while prescribing books for kids..

Phoenix area schools all are required to provide busses for junior high and high school kids that live more than 2.5 miles away. That is generally a walkable distance, even in the May and August heat. I know, as from middle school on I did exactly that (walked or biked ~2 miles to and from school in the Phoenix metro).

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.

2.5 mi is almost an hour away on foot. That target shouldn't be more than ~30 minutes which is what, 1.5 mi?

2.5 miles is a < 10 minute bike.

> That is generally a walkable distance

It is walkable. Can you walk 2.5 miles? I can.

So, we're going to start school an hour later to let kids sleep in. And then make them get up at the same early time so they can walk an hour to school? And then likely get to school smelling like a pool of sweat. That sounds sub-optimal.

Whew, so getting to exercise is smelling like a pool of sweat? Can't figure out why kids are so fat....

Walking an hour to school, especially in various weather conditions.. yes, you'd wind up sweating a lot. There's a reason that most gyms have showers.

I used to bike 7 miles to school in Minnesota, year round, back in the days when we had snow. Old "road racing" bike (skinny tires).

In the winter wearing a trench coat, a dr. who scarf, and beetle-eye mirrored sunglasses so my eyes didn't freeze.

Uphill both ways, right?

I’ve ridden skinny tires in the snow and… yeah I’d probably chance it in MN (at least Saint Paul where I actually lived through a winter, can’t speak to Minneapolis but I’d bet it’s just as passable). I’ll never do it again in Seattle, where even arterial streets have a grade unsafe for foot traffic in freezing weather conditions.

you can't speak to Minneapolis from St. Paul? I've never been to either but Minneapolis-St. Paul is one city, isn't it? Twin Cities, Minnesota Twins and all?

Nope, not the same city! Twin cities yes, but different municipalities. There’s even a little burb in between.

I grew up in an incredibly rural town (population ~1200) in new england. I had to walk half a mile down a dirt road to catch a bus at 6:30am. It's often still dark out at this time -- having a later start and still having to do the walk would have actually been safer. Not that it was particularly dangerous. I was more worried about a coyote than anything else. The bus ride was an hour long.

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

when I was a teen I was sent to bed at 10, had no trouble falling asleep and got plenty of sleep. I know teens like to rebel and do what they want and stay up late, but that's different than saying it's difficult for them to actually fall asleep at a reasonable hour and it seems rather drastic to rearrange everyone else's schedule to accommodate staying up late playing games and texting

Research has found that teens need more sleep than adults.

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...

I'm well aware of the research, I'm talking about the scheduling.

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

Where are school buses in your scenario? I grew up in a couple different sprawling suburbs and I could always just walk to the bus stop.

As buildings closed due to shrinking enrollment, my small town school system went to picking up kids in front of their homes.

And then people say that they live in suburbia because it is better to raise children...

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...

I always wonder when reading the posts about how it's impossible for kids/teenagers to get to school by themselves because of weather, are the parents happy with the type of dependent children they create? Children that have to rely on their parents to get anywhere until well into their teenager years seems like a disaster to me. How will they ever learn to become independent?

Sadly they are happy with dependent children.

Not wanting your kid to walk 2 miles to school when the windchill is -40F isn't an independence problem; it's a safety issue.

> 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.

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...

[2] https://nhts.ornl.gov/briefs/Travel%20To%20School.pdf

What time does school finish and why isn't getting home a similar issue?

Getting home is a big issue for a lot of families. School ends around 3 pm, but most kids do some sort of after school activity like a sport to bridge the gap until after 5 pm when a parent can come through the pickup line. Growing up, there was also just general “after-school” programs. Basically just day care for after the school day that would cost extra.

most schools are located near public transportation and even if there are no bus stops near the home it is generally easy enough for kids to get to their parent's office/rec center/ friend's house etc. basically you have a lot more options when everyone is no longer rushing to be at work or school

Those kids in Phoenix and Maine should just take a school bus like half the kids in America that cannot take themselves. Phoenix suburbs aren't that sparsely populated.

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.

from the ages of 8 to 13 i woke up at 5:45 and did a double public bus transfer every weekday to get to the out of district rich kids school, approx 45 miles

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.

“there’s no bus”

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.

When it’s 110 in Phoenix don’t send the kids to school because it’s summer.

That's what Americans get for building the suburbs so poorly. And Phoenix is uninhabitable, nobody lived there before AC.

Let work start later too. Tell that boss he can get with the times.

There are definitely jobs that start before 09:00.

My workplace starts at 06:00 or 07:00 depending on how much work is on, there are no other options.

> That doesn’t work in a huge percentage of areas in the US. Heat, cold, darkness

Lmao how do people talk like this with a straight face.

and this is a easier way to make sure kid had arrived school!

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