Keep in mind that in our school district, elementary school students need to be in by 8:40 while high school students need to be in by 7:50.

Our neighborhood is setup for walking. The elementary school is a six block walk, so most people walk their kids to school. My daughter didn't sleep past 7:00 for most of elementary school. Our experience was that elementary really could have started closer to 8:00.

I'm with you on all your other points. But, I think our experience was significantly different for elementary school.

Our corporation hired a firm to do a study, found that younger children performed much better during earlier hours, and flipped the schedules. The next year, the high school started at 8:50, and the elementary school at 7:45, and the schedules have been essential unchanged since. I can't describe how much of a difference that 1.5 hours made to a 16-year old.

As a father of 3 young children, they rarely sleep past when I have to wake them for school anyway. The same is definitely not true of teenagers.

Kids are different, and we really don't have very good ways of dealing with that in some ways...

What I would suggest is that there is not a Pareto-optimal solution here short of redesigning how schooling works entirely...

(Our no-longer-elementary-schooler, by the way, never really had this problem. He just seems to sleep a lot less in general.... kids are different.)

Some of the kids mindfulness podcasts (Peace Out as an example) are also good for this kind of thing

The one of reading age is already reading after he's in bed. The hard part is getting him to stop and actually go to sleep.

I will look into the podcasts; thank you for the suggestion!

However, she still seems wired to fall sleep at a certain time, and we finally decided that fighting biology is a losing battle. The strategy of moving bedtime a little bit earlier each day didn't work at all.

One can try but you will be limited by biology: The problem is that our internal clocks are reset by daylight. You can't just shift yourself to another timezone, since your circadian rhythm will always set itself back to the respective local time. So if your brain prefers you to go to sleep and to wake up at certain points it will always be relative to "local (sunlight) time", not relative to human clock time.

I work in the education industry, and the education experts in our company have been saying this for years.

All the sleep-cycle research is on his side. And he was friendly, focused and persistent. But his campaign failed.

A later school start would have cut into the available daylight for after-school sports practices and events. Perhaps 30% of students participated in these, and perhaps 10% in total (or their parents!) were adamant that anything that short-changed the football team was an evil that needed to be stopped.

Still, the don't-do-it crowd was vocal and implacable. Eventually everyone else gave up. So high school students continue to get out of bed, very groggy, at a time that's too early for them, and struggle to get a grip on their morning classes. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Its basically that society used to require daylight to get anything done two centuries ago, and most people worked the farm by daylight, so fast forward generations and centuries and we are still structuring our lives around that - such that we are actually outside in the dark and doing our main activities indoors during the day.

Humanity is nothing if not set in its ways.

Exactly!

Your last sentence could not be more true.

The other problem is do you have any idea of how much bureaucratic nonsense would have to be changed in order to make one simple change such as changing the schedule of a school start and stop time.

It makes you wonder how hard it is to change things that may be of higher importance than this.

I feel like a big part of it is that very young children are geared towards being early (at least from my perspective) risers. Parents end up shifting their day to account for that. And then as kids get older, their rhythms start moving to starting the day later, but by that time the parents' routine is molded around being up early.

Not sure where I'm going with this exactly, just an observation of mine.

;)

Now that’s in essence the whole problem with tax cuts and privatizations: public service is cut to the bone, and privatized ones maximize their profits together with the citizenry’s inconvenience.

Do it like daylight savings time. Have everything start two hours later, all year. The issue for the kids is time related to sunrise, not time related to when the parents go to work.

Is that what it is? I thought it was total sleep duration. Do you have a link explaining more?

They're related. If you go to sleep at the same time (relative to actual-midnight) and get up an hour before school, you get more sleep when school starts later.

Or else what difference would any of it make? If all you did was start school at 9:30 instead of 7:30 and then kids used that to go to bed two hours later, nothing has changed. But when people go to sleep (and are inclined to wake up) has a lot to do with daylight.

That still doesn't seem all that helpful. If my high school had started at 10 instead of 8, I'd be out of class at 5:30 instead of 3:30, done with fencing practice at 8 instead of 6, etc. I'd finish the night's homework two hours later, and finishing that was already well past sundown even on the original schedule. A later start time wouldn't have been an opportunity to stay up later -- it would have been an obligation to stay up later.

The total lack of unscheduled time is an independent problem.

The obvious problem then being that the routes are too long.

You have to wonder if there isn't some kind of carpool incentive the school could give to parents to get rid of 90-100% of buses. How many stay at home parents with 9-passenger vehicles would be willing to make $500/month by filling their minivan with other kids when they deliver their own kid as they were going to do regardless?

Cheaper than buses, kids spend less time sitting in vehicles because there are 8 kids instead of 30, fewer vehicles (and especially fewer huge diesel buses) on the road because those parents were driving their kids anyway.

RE carpooling, this probably cost competitive but their are other factors that make this harder than you think. Buses are allowed exemptions to booster seat rules, minivans aren't- do you leave the van full of car of booster seats all day? Do kids carry their own? My kindergartener still has issues buckling their self in in a crowded car, that really pushes up pickup/drop off time spent. How do you get kids to school if the primary driver is sick or has car trouble? Who is liable for accidents? Do you randomly drug/alcohol test your parents?

None of these are insolvable, but they also aren't easy.

School busing in the era of autonomous vehicles gets a lot more interesting- you could have much smaller and efficient pick up routes. However, I think it will take (US at least) society a while before they are willing to leave 4-8 children alone in a car for 30 minutes a day. It just takes a couple 5th graders fighting in a car before the district decides supervision is needed.

Buses are allowed exemptions for pragmatic reasons, not safety reasons. Whatever the rule is, it should be the same for both, in which case there is no relative advantage. If you're not willing to allow it for a minivan, why are you willing to allow it for a bus? (This also doesn't apply to high school students who don't need them anyway.)

> How do you get kids to school if the primary driver is sick or has car trouble?

How do you do it when the school bus driver is? You maintain some level of reserve and you send someone else.

> Who is liable for accidents?

The insurance company. The better question is who pays for the insurance, but considering that the school would already be paying for it for a school bus, it still doesn't appear to be any disadvantage for the school either way.

> Do you randomly drug/alcohol test your parents?

They're voluntarily choosing to drive someone else's kids for money. If you want to do that and they don't, they don't get put on the roster and don't get paid. It seems like the only real question is whether (or how often) it's worth the cost given the expected probability of drug abuse in your parent population.

Speed doesn’t kill, change in speed kills.

With significant mass at play, a bus in a collission doesn’t change speed as suddenly as a car, thus passengers experience less G force.

The rule does appear to relate to weight, and safety reasons:

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/01/why-the-schoo...

Notable quote:

> Federal agencies like the National Highway Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have long maintained that even without seat belts, school buses are the safest mode of transportation for children. Between 2005 and 2014, NHTSA reported 1,191 crashes involving school buses or other vehicles functioning as school buses. That makes up less than 1 percent of the 331,730 fatal collisions in those 10 years. Among the 133 people who die each year on average in related crashes, only 11 are bus passengers or drivers.

However, that doesn’t help when the bus collides with an immovable object, so the rules are being reconsidered.

No, buses are safer, period, even without seatbelts. Occupants of bigger vehicles have much better outcomes in auto collisions, and buses are some of the biggest vehicles on the road.

Also, most school buses don't do much freeway driving... Not having a seatbelt in 25 mph collision is one thing. Not having a seatbelt in a 70 mph collision is lethal.

By causing much worse outcomes for occupants of the other vehicle or pedestrians in the same collision. Not really something you want to have around your schools and homes where your kids may be the pedestrians or occupants of the other vehicles.

It's also no help for single-vehicle collisions, which are nearly two thirds of auto collisions. 12 ton bus vs. 2000 ton overpass, overpass wins.

In addition to the unfortunate high center of gravity that increases the probability of rollovers (which are especially likely to cause injury without seatbelts).

> Also, most school buses don't do much freeway driving... Not having a seatbelt in 25 mph collision is one thing. Not having a seatbelt in a 70 mph collision is lethal.

Which is a reason why statistics make school buses appear safer than they actually are -- a minivan picking up the same kids would be on the same roads with the same traffic speeds, even if the "average" minivan would be on different roads traveling at higher speeds.

That may even be a good basis for the rule -- car seat required if traveling more than 35MPH.

This has nothing to do with whether or not bus riders need to wear seat belts.

> It's also no help for single-vehicle collisions, which are nearly two thirds of auto collisions. 12 ton bus vs. 2000 ton overpass, overpass wins.

> In addition to the unfortunate high center of gravity that increases the probability of rollovers (which are especially likely to cause injury without seatbelts).

You're making buses sound like deathtraps. And yet, per passanger-mile traveled, they, despite lacking seatbelts, are two orders of magnitude safer then personal automobiles. [1] 0.11 deaths/billion miles, versus 7.3 deaths.

Buses, the way we currently use them, are much safer then cars. This isn't even a point of debate.

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/environment/transpor...

And the liability issues all seem to go the other way, don't they? Buses are less safe (they don't even have seatbelts), problematic incidents involve a larger number of students, the buses are more officially associated with the schools, etc. And actual parents obviously have better incentives to make sure their kids are safe than someone who is only doing it for a paycheck.

Some kids threw peanuts out the window and into his car. He followed us to the next stop and pounded on the door. She courteously opened the door and in he came, shouting the whole way.

The awkwardness was compounded when I realized I had known this man for 10 years.

I don’t have a very high opinion of bus driver training.

So the problem starts multiplying.

1. Can't afford supplies, facilities, etc.

2. Can't afford to be properly staffed.

3. The school is invariably going to be under-performing and we've decided as a society that if your school isn't performing well we're going to penalize it by cutting funding, which exacerbates the funding problem.

4. You've got all sorts of people, fiscal hawks, tax payers, etc who don't really want to pay for education, let alone pay for half empty schools and all that overheard. No one really wants to subsidize a ghost town...

So the result is school districts that are too small to make sense being combined together to try and pool their resources and maintain quality and efficiency.

So if you live out in super rural or low population density areas, and families aren't churning out children like they're old school farmers or Catholics, then this is the sort of reality you'll have to deal with.

We are lucky that our school district provides before and after school programs since my daughter's elementary school doesn't start until after 9:00 AM.

The battle to get up early is about as old as time. We aren’t that far removed from an agrarian-based economy, and farm work has always required very early rising (my father grew up raising dairy cows: he was fond of reminding us as children that the cows don’t care how tired you are).

“Early to bed and early to rise” is not a modern day mantra, but I fear we’ve kept the wake up call constant while continuing to push how long we stay up. I don’t know how to fix it: if your kid is in an after-school program until 6, comes home to eat dinner, and then still has to do homework... I don’t see how an early bedtime is even possible.

Have you actually looked? Ask some parents and see what replies you get.

Continuing our story time, as a child a very small number of my classmates were part of after-school programs. Kids today are much more scheduled and for far later into the day. I grew up wandering the streets and maybe had baseball practice one day a week with a game on Saturday. I was home from school around 3:30, had homework done by 4:30-5:00, ate dinner around 5:30, and was put to bed (in elementary school) by 8.

I remember the thrill of having my bed time pushed to 9 around 8th grade. Bed time was 10 in high school except for weekends.

Very few people rode the bus to school: most had a parent drop them off.

This game changes significantly when both parents work. If both parents have to be in the office by 8, kids have to take the bus. Which means they have to get up very early. If both parents work until 5, then kids have to be in after-school programs. They’ll get home by 6-ish and have to fit in dinner, homework, and whatever activities they need to put on their resume to get into college.

If you wanted to sleep, you shouldn’t have chosen to rent. Your landlord couldn’t be expected to pay $1000’s [1] extra to build your apartment, after all.

(1) https://www.remodelingexpense.com/costs/cost-soundproof-insu...

Do you know where the differing laws are?

Pretty sure it's the only time in my life where I've literally slept as much as I wanted...and felt great.

And %3.3 people have DSPS, who are just simply labelled as sleazy.

The primary purpose of K-12 education these days is to keep kids locked up so their parents can go to work. If Mom and Dad have to be at work at 8, as is often the case, the kids have to be at school before 8. Teenagers, who naturally sleep in later than younger kids, would be better served starting school at 9, but because our society still infantilizes teenagers and young adults, we can't systemically trust them to fend for themselves in the mornings.

This isn't to say that K-12 schools are entirely unconcerned with actual education, but it has to accomplish this goal within the constraint of keeping children locked up.

Wait, what? I slept so much in college. Way more than at any other point in my life. You schedule your own classes and aren't actually in class that much, gives you plenty of time to sleep.

The statement, however, said college means no sleep. That is a bit disingenuous to say that was meant to imply the person was working full time.

That would be like saying "living in an apartment means no sleep!" because you lived in an apartment above a 24 hour bowing alley.

I didn't hate it. Sleeping during the day has taught me how to put a pillow over my head in order to block out all light, and now I can sleep in the brightest loudest room without trouble.

I haven't had lucid dreams since then, or if I have, they've been really really rare and extremely hard to remember. Now that I think about it... Could my lucid dreams and OOB have been triggered by smog from the traffic in that area??

Though not during the day, I lived in a second floor apartment that overlooked a traffic circle that had an elevated subway stop, was a main route for ambulances going to the hospital a block away, and a crucial interchange for traffic entering/existing that part of the city. I barely slept for the first few days and then got the best sleep of my life. I rarely woke up for anything other than my nightly trip to the restroom.

Fast forward a few years and I now live in the suburbs. I've been woken up several times in the past month by the sounds of a mouse scurrying in the ceiling of an adjacent room.

When I've stayed over at friends house (who are parents) they have very strict go to bed times for their kids. THOSE darn crazy kids are up at 5 or 5:30 banging around the house full of energy.

I remember having to get up at 5:20 AM four days a week, to leave 20 minutes later to catch a bus at 5:58 AM to be get to high school in time for classes starting at 7:10 AM. And a teacher complaining to my parents that I often seem tired.

That's the only reason I don't put my daughter on the school bus. I can save her an extra 30 minutes of sleep by driving her to the school myself.

In all seriousness, I've seen mentions of studies that suggest going from 8 hours to 6 does _not_ correlate with a 25% decrease in productivity, because most people aren't consistently productive for all 8 hours of a day. I know in my case, there's an extremely strong inverse correlation with productivity and how bored I am with a particular task. I'm sure I'm not alone.

When I first started freelancing hourly, it was a sobering feeling to see how little of my time was actually billable for actual work. It takes random screen grabbing software to make you realize that most of the time you are not working. Of course those days have long passed for me but I’m always left to remember just how wasteful office workplaces are and how much time people waste away in their life. More than half of their working life is a total waste. Tell me, how does that make you feel? :)

Lack of sleep is very rarely an issue with your employer.

The hospital staff absolutely knows that sleep is important, but they have competing goals that are deemed important enough to interrupt sleep for. That seems very much different from societal-level / cultural priorities.

Isn't the amount of sleep you get determined by when you go to sleep? So if elementary school kids need more sleep just... put them to bed earlier?

"Imagine having to get home from your commute, feed your family, getting the older siblings to/from extracurriculars and then getting the elementary school ones to bed by 9:00/10:00pm. It's easier said than done! School needs to start at 11!"

I must be missing something. How is your family life going to be less hectic after work with school being 2 hours later?

(1) The school day is too long and the school year too short, anyway, so chopping two hours off the end of the day and making it up by extending the school year would be a win.

(2) Even if you don't do that, eliminating the end-of-school to end-of-typical-fulltime-work gap would be a different win.