The answer is to get up at 5 in the Summer and 7 in the Winter, or even better to get up at 10 in the Summer and 12 in Winter since you would put everyone on UTC.
If everyone was on the same time table society would quickly adopt a strategy where business hours shift seasonally. In Summer your hours might be 12-22, in Spring and Fall have them be 13-23, and in Winter have them be 14-00. They already do that, except the government changes everyones clocks at once rather than just changing business hours every season. Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock, especially when you factor international scheduling around DST changes and timezone changes.
>Its less overhead to change business hours than every clock
I'm not convinced. A LOT of customer-facing business (restaurants, retail, government offices, etc.) have fixed hours. Sure. They can individually publish their "personal DST" shift--which is of course just like having DST for anyone working for them.
Personally, I'm generally flexible enough these days that I don't really care much any longer though I'd be fine with New England moving to Atlantic time and eliminating DST.
If dawn didn't happen until after 0800, I could understand the concern. But the time between dawn and sunrise is much safer than the time right after sunrise. When the sun is low in the sky it blinds drivers.
Determine the optimal time for Wednesday, round to the nearest 10 minutes, and apply that to the entire week.
Considering the student with the longest commute, they should leave their house an hour after there is enough sunlight to make things clearly visible to a typical child in a typical bedroom.
The school can't possibly match up with every different work schedule. Matching up with none of them is fair. It's not the school's problem anyway.
Permanent EST: As it is, the sun rises in Boston before 5:30 AM from May 9-July 25, 2.5 months. With permanent EST, the sun would rise before 4:30 AM for those 2.5 months. People would much rather have that sunlight later in the day when they can enjoy it after work, etc.
Permanent EST-1: As it is, the sun rises in Boston after 7 AM from Dec 7-Jan 30. With permanent EST-1, the sun would rise after 8 for those ~2 months. This would be a real danger for kids walking to school. Shifting the school day isn't straightforward because of parents work schedules, etc.
The response to these is inevitably that we could shift our lives around to adjust to a permanent EST or EST-1, but such shifts would be much more disruptive than people think. It's easy to make a change like this in a southern state -- less so the further north you go.