If you're at a latitude that only gets 8-9 hours of daylight in the winter, there just isn't much daylight to go around. If you're adding it to the evening, you're taking it from the morning.

While I agree that the sun setting at 3:30 is a drag, I'm not sure pushing that to 4:30 really helps much.

During the summer, when you push sunset from 8pm to 9pm, that's at least an hour most people get to use (they are still awake and not working), and you're taking away an hour from 4am to 5am which most people don't (almost everyone is asleep).

During the winter, you're taking away an hour of daylight from, say, 7-8am, which most people can use (it will either be during their commute or before their commute, which they can enjoy themselves) to add an hour from, say, 3:30-4:30, which for many people is still going to be in the middle of their workdays.

Florida's case isn't quite so bad as that. In Tampa, FL, they are in fact taking away people's 7-8am sunshine in the winter, but they're at least adding sunshine from 6-7pm which will be fairly useful sunlight.

I'm just not sure it's useful for anyone much north of Florida to follow suit - you're trading valuable pre-work daylight for during-work daylight.

For the New England states, they're far enough East that it makes sense for them to join the AST time-zone and do away with DST.

Birds start chirping here at 3:30am... that ain't right.

They're not just East, they're North. If you throw Burlington, VT into the AST, you've then got 8:30 sunrises in the winter.

I think you could make an argument for "double daylight savings time", so that you're 3 months of UTC-5 in the winter and 3 months of UTC-3 in the summer, with UTC-4 in between (which I guess would be AST with "daylight savings time" in the summer and "daylight payback time" in the winter), but when you've got 16 hours of daylight in the summer you've got to put them somewhere. Do you really want to have the sun set at midnight so that it's easier to sleep in in the mornings?

As a kid, I didn't care whether it was light out on the way to school. School time wasn't my time anyway, might as well be dark.

On the other hand, having an hour of sunlight after the school is over has been a drag, as you said, especially when it was eaten up by the commute.

The schools should just be starting at a later time. There is already ample evidence that school start times are too early for students.