You are also aware that if kids should wake up later and go to school later you’ve effectively changed nothing except now true noon is around 13:00 as opposed to 12:00, that is you’ve lost your extra hour of sunlight to schools staying open that extra hour.
We've known for a while that school that starts too early [1]. Some school boards have shifted back start of school by an hour already [2].
If the education board really wanted, they could offer afternoon start times or evening school. This has actually been proposed and met with enthusiasm. [3]
But to my point - this is entirely independent of when we choose to have the sun overhead.
My argument is that most workers and non-school age people are
- likely sleeping through the first hour of sunlight in the winter
- enjoy leisure hours after work more than before work
- enjoy having sunlight after work
Shifting sunrise forward an hour would result in a dramatic quality of life increase for most people.
Further, the added enjoyment of extra sunlight will cause people to spend more time outdoors and away from home after work, increasing their consumption. Businesses will be happy about this.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...
[2] https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/12/12/high-school-start...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/05/how-s...
These claims need to be backed up by data as there is a conflicting claim that potential sleep deprivation caused by the offset would negate these benefits.
The fact that school already starts too early, makes me doubt that changing to a permanent DST would magically fix that. In fact I would argue that it would make the problem worse. Much more robust is to move to standard time.
I think most people actually prefer sleeping through the first hour of sunlight, and would continue doing so given the choice. I think it is only exceptional that people wake up earlier to enjoy longer part of the day, e.g. during a vacation. During the everyday life I think most people would naturally prefer starting their day with the sunrise (as opposed to before). And in fact I believe there are health implications in forcing people to do otherwise. Not with everybody, but with significant enough portion of the population that it would be unwise to force it on everybody.
Your point about school hours being independent of the rest of the population is naive. Parents life syncs with their kids as they prefer to be working while their kids are in school, cities set bus schedules according to school hours, businesses open in accordance to when school is over, etc. Peoples lives are heavily depended on school hours.
By your same argument, the health of workers faced with depression from getting off work at night is also worth noting. I don't have a compelling paper to cite, but I can say that anecdotally everyone I know and talk with about DST hates wintertime hours.