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Comment by jobs_throwaway | Hacker News Reader

This is why we have school busses. Why are children being tasked with transporting other children to school?

School busses are shared across age ranges. So teenagers get the first bus, then middle schoolers get one an hour later, then grade schoolers.

So if you punt the highschool bus to later, you are either making for a very late school day, or making younger kids wake up earlier.

Or the solution could be to triple the cost of school transportation.

Or locate schools closer to where people live. It seems like it ought to be possible to locate at least elementary schools within walking distance of the kids homes.

Well, most do. But culturally we are moving in the opposite direction - there are quite a few stories of parents getting cited or arrested for letting their kids walk to school on their own.

> Or the solution could be to triple the cost of school transportation.

Yes, let's try to kill the one form of public transportation we have in the USA that works decently and is widely available.

> So teenagers get the first bus, then middle schoolers get one an hour later, then grade schoolers.

Where I grew up it was the opposite. Grade schoolers started first at 8:00, middle-schoolers at 8:30, high-schoolers at 9:00. As a high schooler you finish school at 4PM, hardly a very late school day. Younger kids naturally go to sleep and wake up earlier than teens anyways, it's not unfair or harmful to have them start school earlier.

Not OP, but OP may have meant:

Sometimes older siblings contribute to childcare. A 9th grader that is home at 3pm, can watch a 4th grader that is home at 4pm until parents arrive home at 5pm.

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