Past a certain age they can do this themselves. A 12 year old is very capable of doing everything besides driving a car
Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.
As that workplace wasn't extremely flexible with time, this involved rescheduling any meetings coming up, leaving, driving home (30 min), getting kid to school (15 min), getting back to work (45 min) if everything was good. Taking an hour and a half to two hours out of a person's work day can be very disruptive.
The issue isn't 9:00 rather than 8:00 or 8:30 but rather a refutation of "are teenagers responsible enough to get to school on their own without any parental coaxing."
Consider the chain of comments:
> > > if the family includes one of each (elementary, middle and high school kids) you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready and head out.
> > Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.
> Surely the high school aged kids can make sure to not oversleep and be responsible enough to ensure that their parents won't get a call at 9:15 when they've failed to show up on time.
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If you're getting all the kids up and ready to go to school at 8:00 am, you've missed the advantage of having a teenager sleep in and get to school at 9:00 am.
If you (the parent) aren't making sure that the teenager is getting to school at 9:00 because you're at work, and aren't getting them up at 8:00 am (with the rest of the kids), then you're going to deal with "teenager slept through all the alarms."
It seems there are programs that exist already to help feed kids breakfast and lunch at schools.
That's not what the GP is talking about. They're saying that there is an overhead to people leaving at different times.