> Here's an idea - let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour rather than make them wake up before the crack of dawn for no reason.

Turns out that that doing just this has quantifiable benefits[1].

[1] "Teens get more sleep, show improved grades and attendance with later school start time, researchers find": https://www.washington.edu/news/2018/12/12/high-school-start...

I think it's mostly the teachers and the administrators who advocate for the earlier times. Well, that and parents who drop off their kids before work. A later start would be great for students.

Work schedules would have to change. Schools are basically a child care service with varying qualities of value-add education thrown in. Maybe after a year of WFH being normalized, companies will be more accepting of flexible schedules.

I used to tutor at a Boys & Girls Club in a very low-income area in Massachusetts. The way they assign students to schools is weird (at least to me, I didn’t grow up here). Students need to apply, even to public schools, and they’re offered spots through some combination of lottery, location, and grades/test scores. One of the girls I tutored went to a school that was pretty far away from her home - something like a 90 minute bus ride thanks to traffic. When I asked her about how she ended up at a school so far away she casually explained that her parents had to be at work early so she had to go to a school where she’d get on the bus as early as possible. It broke my heart.

I had a 70-80 minute bus ride every day for 7 years, while pretty annoying, I wouldn't call it "heart-breaking". You did homework, read books, listened to music, etc. It was just a thing you did.

As a kid, it just was.

Sure, and I’m glad that worked out for you! But for the population at large, lots of research suggests that early wake up times are detrimental to student outcomes as a population.

Work schedules would not need to change if one salary would be all you need to support a family. This world we've raised for ourselves was underpinned by a primary wage earner, and a primary homemaker. We even used to subsidize homemaking. We've gone backwards all in the name of progress.

Alternatively, let both parents work, have careers, and be theoretically capable of supporting themselves independently, and also reduce the minimum number of hours people are expected to work in a week in order for it to count as a "real" job, so that both parents are also able to spend adequate time with their families.

I'd like to see some change, but I'm not sure that just going back to some version of how it was done when my generation was young necessarily counts as progress.

Dual-income households were always a thing, even in the most gender-restrictive days of the 1950s. The idea that one male breadwinner would provide for a whole household was always an upper-middle-class fantasy.

> Dual-income households were always a thing, even in the most gender-restrictive days of the 1950s. The idea that one male breadwinner would provide for a whole household was always an upper-middle-class fantasy.

Source? because this isn't my partner's experience. Her grand parents owned a house, cars and raised more than 5 kids on a single factory worker salary. It would be just impossible nowadays in most of the west.

Here you have stats for 1950 per age brackets https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2000/feb/wk3/art03.htm

Basically you have more then third of women working in any except oldest one. Third of women is a lot of women, a lot of households.

Moreover, people kind of tend to forget that women needs to eat even if husband died or got sick, even if they are single, even if husband is unemployed, even if husband is alcoholic, even if husband is in prison. People also kind of tend to forget that having to marry anyone just so that someone feeds you is one path toward disasterous abusive marriages you are trapped in (where you still have to pretend everything is ok for appareances sake).

And 1950 is when economy was the best, male employment was like 95%. And you still had women who were married and they worked and their income mattered to family. (Surprising example is Rosa Parks who worked for money and loss of income was issue to her and her husband.)

> We've gone backwards all in the name of progress.

It's not done in the name of progress, it's done in the name of profitability.

The rate of profit and worker productivity are at all time highs, but who benefits? Worker compensation has been stagnant and decoupled from profitability and productivity increases for close to five decades now. Even engineer compensation hasn't kept up with productivity, inflation and cost of living increases.

That assumes one parent from each family wants to forego a career to focus entirely on raising kids though.

If they both want to work, then child care should be affordable for the dual income family. Generally it's not which is why schools are required to fill that care gap and be in sync with working hours.

There's a bit of a math problem there, though. It's hard to make things work out so that the child care is affordable for the parents, the teachers get reasonable compensation, and you're meeting reasonable (and, depending on where you are, legal) standards for child-caregiver ratios.

Doubly so if "affordable for the parents" means "affordable for parents who are in the same income bracket as your average pre school teacher."

Source: I've served on the board of a day care.

True, although kids are only of childcare age for a few years, so if all adults share the cost burden of childcare for everyone throughout their working lives rather than just paying for their own needs for a few years, the math works out a lot easier. (IE, childcare paid or subsidized by the government.)

The other piece of the puzzle though is that there need to be sufficient providers, which can't happen instantaneously. So you'd have to scale up such an initiative in a sensible way.

This is where subsidies or government programs should come in to patch over where the market fails to meet families' needs.

Those families shouldn't have children then.

I know that borders on callousness, and obviously I don't think we shouldn't take care of single parent households that don't have an option or that the child tax credit shouldn't be high enough so kids don't go hungry. Just if you reduce this to the choice to have a child and a lack of outlying circumstances, you shouldn't have a kid if you don't have someone ready to take care of them and the freedom to make that choice.

Being completely dependent on another to be able to live your life can lead to all kinds of abuse.

Single parent household needs to be a supported scenario for public services.

I agree with that as well. Supporting single parent families can be much cheaper in the long run.

Well, maybe, but many parents would probably both work anyways because they would be competing with other dual income family units for housing, schooling and other cost intensive resources.

This wouldn also imply return to same domestic violence rates as used to be, because half population would be dependent again with no power to change own situation. Even currently the rates of it goes up and down with who is getting jobs.

Also, there are other reasons why the situation you desribes as ideal sparked the protests back then - for many people ir was unhappy unsatisfying sitiation.

Later drop offs would be exceedingly difficult for lower income families because their schedules are fixed and not as flexible as higher income jobs. I think permanent DST is a long time coming, but after the pandemic, it’s clear the lack of flexibility that lower income families face.

> I think it's mostly the teachers and the administrators who advocate for the earlier times. Well, that and parents who drop off their kids before work.

So what if teachers have children they need to drop off before work? That leads to some kind of infinite recursion.

Earlier times are for high school sports competitions.

Everyone has to get up early all year, so the track team does not have to stay up late a couple times per year. Well, also football, basketball, etc

After a study with the same findings came out the school district my son was in changed it's start time. To an earlier start time. This is in Texas so not surprising.

Here's an argument for DST I haven't seen yet - circadian rhythms. Forget about "maximizing daylight."

Your circadian rhythm is actually mediated/regulated/communicated to every cell in your body by a diurnal oscillation of YOUR BODY TEMPERATURE, which is coolest around 3am and warmest around 3pm.

These times just so happen to correspond with the times of coolest and hottest surface air temperatures on earth - and it's not a coincidence that our bodies evolved that way.

Now, in the summer, the hottest time of the day is actually LATER than it is in the winter, since the sun spends more time in the sky and the earth has more time to heat up. So it makes sense to align our circadian rhythms with that by springing forward one hour before summer, and then falling back one hour before winter - when the hottest time of day starts to edge earlier.

That is the whole point of DST, although many people seem not to realize it. It allows us to wake up around sunrise all year long, which is our bodies' natural tendency.

Another thing nobody seems to realize is that we've already tried this experiment once before, and it was an utter failure. Quoting Wikipedia:

Permanent DST in the US was briefly enacted by President Nixon in 1974, in response to the 1973 oil crisis. The proposal was initially supported by an estimated 79% of the public; that support dropped to 42% after its first winter, owing to the harshness of dark winter mornings that permanent DST creates. An estimated six school children were also killed by motorists due to the new law. The new permanent DST law was retracted within the year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...

All of this is extremely dependent on latitude so if you actually wanted a system that accounted for it it would have to be a lot more complicated than wide vertical bands that go from basically the tropic to the pole.

Where I live these things vary by a lot more than an hour, so DST has a meaningful effect on any of these supposed benefits for about, if I'm being generous, 2-3 weeks a year. It's silly.

The body temperature cycle is regulated by light exposure.[1]

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144314.h...

> "Teens get more sleep, show improved grades and attendance with later school start time, researchers find"

But that's relative to the clock, and where the clock is relative to daylight hours has no relevance.

I'm responding to this comment:

> let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour

Yeah, what’s stopping schools from having their own “DST/Standard Time” switch. Schools should set their hours according to what makes sense for students. We don’t need the whole country to set its clock around students.

IIRC, parents--particularly parents with younger kids. The highschoolers need (in their view) to be home earlier than the middle- and elementary schoolers to be the responsible party so the parents can come home at the end of the workday.

The problem is deeply structural.

Sports are another big reason parents want older kids to get to school earlier than younger kids (as they can't take everyone at once, or else you need way more busses)—longer daylight hours after school for practice. Any attempt to change the schedule to get older kids to school later and younger ones earlier, will run into strong resistance from Sports Parents™, no matter the benefits to health or academics.

("why don't they just have the sports teams do one short practice in the morning, and one short practice in the afternoon?" 1. some of them actually do that already, despite the crazy-early school start time, and 2. for the less-insanely-dedicated sports that can't rely on parents to drop all the team members off before school, you'd need to run extra busses just for the sports kids, if they're showing up earlier than everyone else, and 3. Depending on the sport, one long practice is better and/or a lot more convenient than two short ones)

>"why don't they just have the sports teams do one short practice in the morning, and one short practice in the afternoon?"

Another reason is that most older kids don't want to be covered in sweat for their entire high school career and having kids communally shower at school is seemingly something that is rightfully being phased out.

> having kids communally shower at school is seemingly something that is rightfully being phased out.

For a sports team, that seems silly.

Most sports have enough weird contact that the showers are probably the least of the problems.

Now, if you want to argue that sports, in general, and school should be separate, I'm all ears.

Interestingly enough, it was the exact opposite when I was in high school. Elementary got out at about 2:45, middle around 3:15, and HS at 4:20. I was very appreciative of our 9:05 start time.

This has never been the case anywhere I've gone to school - outside of special classes, every school got out at the same time.

That said, there'd be nothing to prevent a school district from adjusting both school times if local parents demanded this be accommodated.

Some school districts are K-8 or 9-12 only, which I've experienced myself. Taking California as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Ca...

> In California there are 560 Elementary districts, 87 High School districts, 330 Unified districts.

(I do think that this isn't a great argument against switching to DST permanently. I think if this was legislated then the school districts would just adapt now, especially since a significant chunk of students are still doing remote learning.)

Where do highschoolers end school sooner then elementary?

All over the place. When I was in school, the same buses that serviced the high schools also serviced the elementary schools. So the high school students would get picked up, and then the elementary kids would be next after that.

Highschoolers here all use public transport. They have more classes then small kids.

Small kids have few classes and before/after optional program that basically do childcare for parents. They are free to go much sooner. Many of them come in and out by public transport too.

Suburban Chicago, at least 15 years ago. I'd get home ~30 minutes before my siblings and I'd keep an eye on them until my mom came home.

It's a great idea, and would work fine for younger kids. High school kids with after-school jobs and sports might find a conflict, though.

I'm in the camp of "seriously, fuck high school sports" because entire districts bend their will and finances to support football programs (other sports? what other sports?) to the detriment of everyone else in the school.

But that POV is spitting into the wind. And god help you if you're in a smaller area where high school sports are the entire social center of the community.

If elementary schools changed schedules by an hour, some parents of elementary school kids would need to change their schedule by an hour as well. When the whole society does this all at once, the individual parents/coworkers/bosses don’t have to negotiate or coordinate anything; it “just happens”.

If we switch to permanent DST, and the whole of society compensates by setting schedules back an hour, all we’ve done is create de-facto permanent standard time. That’s the best-case scenario.

I have a better idea. Let’s just actually switch to permanent standard time, so we don’t have to hope that society shakes itself out.

I highly doubt that would actually happen, though. During the last year, we've encouraged folks to work at home and schools have been closed. Yet those folks that work retail or healthcare or factories still had to go to work like normal. Considering how much of the population that covers, I highly doubt folks would be changing their schedules.

After all, if one group of folks can figure out how to work around the change, there is no reason for everyone else to need changes.

Exactly. We, the people, need to exert back pressure on a deeply flawed system to force it to happen. Such a change wouldn't be nearly as problematic if union membership, for example, was widespread.

How does union membership help align a work team that needs two members for a team job (for task-related or safety-related reasons) and exactly one of the two needs to change schedules because their kid's school changed schedule by an hour?

A lot of elementary schools have before and after school programs so it'll be a mixed bag.

> We don’t need the whole country to set its clock around students.

Don't we, though? Parents have jobs, jobs have schedules, and those schedules need to be coordinated with school drop-off and pickup times.

And if it's functionally impossible for the overwhelming majority of employed adults who are parents to meet those schedules due to school times being shifted... businesses will either adapt their schedules to meet the new reality or they'll fire 75%+ of their staff.

I know which one I'd bet on.

Schools also have to take bus schedules into account. A district with elementary / middle / and high school will have 3 separate bus schedules if there's enough population.

My 8 year old nephews' school day doesn't begin until 9:40, but it ends after 5pm and allows very little sunlight for play time in the evenings. I know that when I was that age, I was far more concerned about being able to go out and play than whether the sun was up when I got up.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of what drives school start times to be earlier is the prevalence of dual income households, where both parents need to get to work, and (particularly with younger children) children need to be cared for.

This brings to mind my own memories of childhood; I have a sense leftover from that that afternoon daycare is relatively common, but early morning daycare perhaps less so?

Just so I understand what you're saying: we should first move the clocks an hour ahead (permanently), then delay our schedules an hour, then ???, and then, I guess, profit?

How exactly does this differ from not moving the clocks an hour ahead permanently and not delaying our schedule for the day for an hour?

This problem (if it even is a problem) affects a small number of students in a handful of regions in the country. Individual schools/school districts are free to come up with their own personalized solutions. There is no reason to involve the other 95% of the population in this game.

Seriously.

If schools want to start at 8am instead of 7am in the winter, then they should just do that.

There are 70+ million children in US, so at least 70+ million parents affected by this "game". That would be half of the working population of 150MM.

Not all children are of school going age. Not all parents work strict 8am-5pm office jobs. Some schools/school districts already start late. A large chunk of the country doesn't have problems with daylight because of location.

My overall point is - the equations of labor, electricity, fuel, school, daycare, geographical times and more are complex enough in this country today that it is okay to let individual schools/offices etc. pick what timings best work for them rather than artificially trying to fit everyone in the same mold.

Is changing the definition of the hours the best way to solve this problem though? It seems tangentially related at best.

You have more daylight in the evening and can actually have some time to enjoy said daylight rather than spending the entire day indoors and going home when it's dark out.

American high schools have to be out around 3 PM to allow for enough time for sports teams to practice. Other schools end up synchronizing to this schedule. A non-trivial reason is that high school teachers with young children need to have them synced with their own work schedules and teachers have some level of control over how school days are scheduled.

Anyway, like everything in the US, blame the obsession with high school athletics.

I have no great love for high school sports, but at least it's a mechanism to get kids moving. Given the obesity epidemic, a solid physical education option seems useful. Definitely has grown into something way beyond that though.

PE class is one thing, building the whole school schedule around the football team's needs is another.

How about we do it the other way: Eliminate daylight saving time and make standard time permanent?

Oh hell no. The late day light is WAY better than early day light. I am not going to mow my lawn at 5 a.m. and piss off all my neighbors (plus the grass tends to have dew and be wet early). Mowing my lawn at 7 pm (if it is still light out), is not a problem.

Daylight time proponents are effectively advocating that the standard work day start an hour earlier relative to the sunlight.

I tend to disagree - better to let people sleep. There's a reason "standard" time was set up that way in the first place. I suspect it works better with our circadian rhythm that way.

> I tend to disagree - better to let people sleep.

I'm not advocating to move around the standard work day, but grown adults could just go to sleep an hour earlier. "let people sleep" makes no sense. It wouldn't take away an hour of their sleep.

This isn’t about “grown adults” and their capabilities. It’s about the well-being of society as a whole. There’s a lot more to consider than “when should working people show up for work”?

Note that a significant portion of society doesn’t have a day job — kids, retired/elderly, caregivers & home-parents, disabled and unable to work, etc. In fact, the needs of these groups ought to be prioritized, since as you said, working adults can adapt.

Adults are sleep deprived not because of sun, but because of evening activities - games, reading internet, movies. They value a bit more entertainment or a bit more work more then sleep.

Half a year there is dark long before adults go to sleep and also dark in the morning. Sun is not preventing sleep, but people dont sleep.

You seem to be conflating two problems. The fact that many people stay up too late entertaining themselves doesn’t change how people as a whole respond physiologically to the presence and absence of sunlight, or how that ought to factor in to policy decisions.

The majority of year there is dark long before adults go to sleep. Adults go to sleep at same times as during summer, the dark is not making them going to sleep more.

For all practical purposes, sun is completely irrelevant to adults sleeping.

I seem to post this for every DST story, so I might as well continue the tradition:

The folks who study this:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology

Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round:

> As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the field to write a Position Paper on the consequences of choosing to live on DST or Standard Time (ST). The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently.

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

For a longer-read, referencing quite a bit of academic literature, but a conclusionary snippet:

> In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently. The latter would exaggerate all the effects described above /beyond/ the simple extension of DST from approximately 8 months/year to 12 months/year (depending on country) since /body clocks/ are generally even later during winter than during the long photoperiods of summer (with DST) (Kantermann et al., 2007; Hadlow et al., 2014, 2018; Hashizaki et al., 2018). Perennial DST increases SJL prevalence even more, as described above.

* https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2019.0094...

Other position papers that I've dug up over the years when curiosity got the better of me:

> Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) is dedicated to advancing rigorous, peer-reviewed science and evidence-based policies related to sleep and circadian biology.

* https://srbr.org/advocacy/daylight-saving-time-presskit/

* (refs, with pro and con): https://srbr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DST-References-S...

European Sleep Research Society:

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

American Academy of Sleep Medicine (with 36 footnotes if you want to dig further):

* https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8780

* https://doi.org/10.5664/jcsm.8780

The Centre for Chronobiology, based at the Psychiatric University Hospital (University of Basel):

* http://www.chronobiology.ch/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/JBR-D...

* http://www.chronobiology.ch/

That's only good for early birds, because you end up with it being light for hours before most people are awake (during the summer). If you keep DST in place permanently, sundown happens later, and you eliminate the need for an extra hour of lighting every evening, which presumably saves electricity.

It's easier to stay awake when it's getting dark than become awake if it's still dark in the morning

Yeah, but I'd 1000x rather commute to work when it's still dark than have it get dark before I get home.

If you get to work by car it's safer with Standard Time.

assuming you're talking about daylight, it depends on your latitude and where your longitude falls in your timezone. with the current system, I drive to work in the dark and I drive home in the dark at different times of the year. I think it's more or less even for me, but maybe there's an optimal timing that minimizes everyone's commuting in the dark time. not that I feel particularly unsafe driving in the dark anyway, I only care if the sun is at an angle where I can't block it with my visor. either way, this seems like a marginal concern.

When I used to commute semi-regularly, part of it was along a highway (to use the term generously) that I swear was laid in a way to maximize the solar glare in some locations. One of those places is where it intersects with an interstate and semi-regularly you'd see cars that had been in accidents or the remnants of same at the side of the road.

I live in a timezone that begins with hints of light appearing at worst somewhere between 4 and 5 am. A combination of location and our timezone shifted to match a neighboring country for ease of tourist made it this way.

I have lived where the sun doesn't appear early in the morning too and I greatly favor it. Living here the sun can set before 5 pm and during the longest days of the year I only see sunset at 730 pm. Yes, I can do more things after dark but I consider it so much worse since it makes me feel like the day is over so early and I only just finished work.

Then when you want to rest in the morning the heat and light creeps in 5 in the morning it also kills your energy for later in the day. So not sure if you are talking from experience living in a place like mine but I would prefer to return to longer evenings and quieter mornings.

Yeah, but none of us really get anything done at work before like 10am anyway no matter which time system we're in.

I have the opposite problem where I live. With DST the sun does not rise until 8 AM.

In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.

It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.

That's my preference too, but making DST permanent is better than continuing to change twice a year.

When confronted with three choices and none of the three have majority support, society usually chooses the "status quo" option. Even when a proper ranked choice vote would end up with one of the other two options.

So I guess I need to keep quiet to ensure that we end up with our second choice rather than our third choice.

Let's split the difference: Spring ahead 1/2 an hour and then keep the clocks there.

So the big problem is springing ahead. No one likes it. On the other hand, everyone loves falling back.

I'd like to propose making the day approximately 9.86 seconds longer, so that each year we accumulate 1 hour of extra time. Then, each fall, we set the clocks back one hour.

You get the benefits of DST (more sunlight later in the day in the summer) without the jarring "spring ahead" each year.

It would be quite annoying to have your clock off a minute every week. The first couple weeks wouldn't be too big of an issue, but when you start getting 10 minutes off you would need to fix your clock.

Nah, it'd be "trivial" (in the way that generates employment for programmers, win-win) for your cell phone and computer to adjust automatically. You might be able to just get the NTP servers to make the adjustment daily and everyone else would just follow along without knowing it. Fancier wall clocks, too.

If you've got a fancy watch, just go get its movement adjusted to run 10 seconds slow. Full employment for watchmakers too, it's a shovel-ready proposal!

Believe it or not but some of us still have dumb watches and clocks. I have a dumb clock in my bedroom, on my oven, and below my tv. I don't want to buy a fancy clock. I just want the clock to tell me the time and I don't want it connecting to my network just to be accurate.

And depending on what sort of dumb clock your dumb clock is, it probably has a screw somewhere to make it run a little faster or slower, or something similar, to tune the clock to make it run at the right speed. You just give it a slight adjustment and presto-chango, it runs at the new speed.

For clocks that take their timing from the frequency of the electric current in the power lines, that's fixable too.

It may be possible to change it, but its a hassle. I don't know if it is possible with something like an oven and wouldn't want to mess with something like that regardless. The solution to the time situation shouldn't be to be messing with electrical currents. That is just going to be a non-starter for so many people.

It's bad enough as it is in the northern latitudes where you wake up at about 5:15AM in June because the sun is already pretty bright. Keeping it on standard time would mean waking up at 4:15AM. Also, it's nice having more daylight after work.

I have the opposite problem where I live. With DST the sun does not rise until 8 AM.

In fact, in January, the sun rises here at 7:40 AM Standard Time. Which would be 8:40 AM Daylight Time.

It would be terrible to have to wake up an hour before sunrise.

That way noon has the sun at zenith, which makes sense.

A lot depends on where you live. In Boston which is fairly northernly by US standards and very far east in a time zone, for example, staying on Eastern Standard Time year round would mean it's sunrise at about 4AM on the summer solstice and it gets dark at 8:30pm rather than 9:30pm like today.

Now, these days, I have a lot of schedule flexibility and at least for activities I'm doing on my own I could just get up earlier in the summer. I'll be a bit out of sync with business schedules but I could largely do it.

States can already make standard time permanent if they want to. Obviously, not many do.

This change just allows states to make DST permanent.

No. Standard time is the worst one.

North of about 45 degrees latitude, the winter time change centers daylight perfectly so that for part of the year students leave home in the dark, go home in the dark, and sit in class through all of the daylight. When the days finally start getting long enough to see a little sunlight at each end, it's time to move the clocks forward and they're back to going to school in the dark. It's brutal.

Way back when I was in school there were a couple that had 10 hour days, to better accomodate parent's schedules. Drop junior off when it fits your morning schedule best, same for pickup in the afternoon. Teachers worked on the early end, late end, took a long lunch, worked four 10 hour days, whatever suited the needs of their students and their own lives. The pickup and dropoff zones didn't get gridlocked with every single parent showing up at the same exact time. My point is, there are far better options available than fooling around with time itself.

In my area this was actually a logistical thing. Other schools in the area bussed children at different hours.

I don't think people are considering this reality in this debate.

I am not advocating for anything.

> Other schools in the area bussed children at different hours.

Do you mean other schools in your school district or schools in other districts?

other schools in my school district.

it was just a crowded and large area. a single high school even put 9th graders in a totally different building and location. It was basically middle middle school. All the levels of school had different start and end times to accommodate, and there were many schools at each level with overlapping bussing.

Any changes made would be district wide.

We probably got here (counterproductive start times) by making budgets the first consideration - with literally everything else following it. It also explains why we segment kids by age.

Adding more buss drivers is relatively cheap. Bussing is ~3% of the total cost of primary school.

I don't know if this is still happening, but there have definitely been issues with bus driver shortages. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/there-s-a...

"hey, so I know the county board is cutting the maxed out education budget by 20% but hear me out, lets not do that and increase it by 3% permanently. I yield my time."

One bus can’t be in two places at once, no matter how many drivers you have.

That 3% already includes busses, maintenance, fuel etc.

Amortized. If you wanted to double the bus fleet at once, that would be a heck of a budgetary challenge.

The physical buss represents ~1 year worth of the cost of bussing students up front. Financing that isn’t a major issue for most local governments.

Again assuming there is some net benefit to the economy to offset this cost.

> Opponents of the bill say DST makes it hard on school children and parents who have to wait at the bus stop in dark hours of the morning.

Probably easier to just give them all flashlights, than to have everyone shift their clocks to accommodate this use case.

How about standard time instead of DST especially in winter

Or here’s an idea: we can do DST in the summer, and standard time in the winter. Best of both worlds!

The problem is the switch, so it's better to get rid of it and then Standard Time is the better choice

This argument makes less and less sense with each passing year. I'm old enough to remember when we had to change all the clocks by hand, and some people had no idea how to change the clocks in microwaves and VCRs or their car, so it'd be off by an hour for half the year. Somehow we managed fine.

These days all clocks change automatically, and there are standard and constantly improving datetime libraries to help applications manage these human factors in a standard way. Your morning alarm is automatically updated, you calendar events automatically reflect the timezone they are defined in.

The only curveball is when when the government arbitrarily changes the rules, like then did not too long ago in extending DST. And which DST advocates are advocating for doing _again_.

It is not about the process of changing the clock, but about the fact that the body should be able to perform one hour earlier from one day to the next. Especially when changing from standard time to DST, this is stressful for the body. https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...

The transition is over the weekend, so really one ought to be able to adjust 20min a day--again, something which could be automated.

But honestly I believe this reporting is overblown. The body is able to adjust rather quickly to such a small difference in time, as many of us who (used to) travel quite frequently know.

Depends on how early your day starts. If you normally start at 05:00 o'clock standard time then to get up at 04:00 o'clock standard time is pretty stressful.

I don’t think it ultimately matters. Shifting the schedule forward or backwards doesn’t change the fact that the students will only have so many hours in the day. The only way to give more time to students is to cut school shorter. That’s to say nothing for the students who would feel compelled to immediately fill that time with another extra-curricular.

IMHO what would help is colleges putting a stop to the resume-padding they implicitly encourage students to do to gain an edge on their peers for acceptance.

When elite colleges get 15-20 applicants for every student they admit, how would you propose they implement this? Roll a d20, score a critical hit, get into Harvard?

Yes, that's EXACTLY how it should work. Lottery

Prediction if Harvard did that: Within two years, Harvard gets 100+ applicants for every spot. 10 years later: Harvard is no longer considered elite (or Harvard after Class of 2030 is no longer considered elite).

That outcome might be aligned with your goals; it's probably not aligned with Harvard's goals nor that of their alumni.

What does elite mean anymore? What makes Harvard elite?

What makes Harvard elite is the demand for the grads, under the belief that they are, on average, somehow stronger employees than graduates from a random “University of State”.

There’s data to suggest that applying to Harvard is a stronger predictor of lifetime outcomes than the incremental prediction provided by graduating is. So, much of the benefit is provided before campus, but that doesn’t mean that 5x as many people would get the benefit if only they’d be convinced to fill out that application by virtue of admissions being driven by rolling dice.

https://time.com/54342/it-doesnt-matter-where-you-go-to-coll...

Just cap the criteria they consider for entry and lottery the qualifying applicants on in.

That’s basically how it works now anyway.

> Here's an idea - let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour rather than make them wake up before the crack of dawn for no reason.

When exactly is the "crack of dawn"? Unless you live near the equator the "crack of dawn" changes every day. If "additional hour" is relative to the clock then you can always start things an hour late relative to the clock, regardless of where the clock is relative to daylight hours.

> let students (and parents) sleep for an additional hour

To complete the sensible set, elementary schools open first, high schools last.

In brutal southern climates, end the school year on Halloween when kids can play outside w/o heat stroke - with kids inside air conditioning during worthless summer months.

Some places have year round schooling.

It's not for "no reason" - Public education's primary purpose in the United States, other than indoctrination, is daycare for the workforce.

So school must start early enough parents can get children to school before heading to their jobs.

Before school programs exist. Daycare exists. School does not need to start early enough for parents to get children off to school first. Folks working retail, in factories, and in health care deal with this all the time.

> makes it hard on school children and parents who have to wait at the bus stop in dark hours of the morning

I can't even understand what is 'hard' about it?

It's a bizarre "con": Pros: better health, less accidents fewer deaths during the switch, etc. Cons: it's "hard" on some kids and parents to wait for the bus in the dark which they already do anyway, just now it's for a few more weeks.

Seems a no brainer.

Con: more accidents in winter time because it's harder to become awake if it's still dark than stay awake if ut becomes dark. More accidents of children if they have to walk to school or the bus. The pros refer only to the elimination of the switch but not to the permanent implementation of the DST. Standard Time would be the better choice.

Montgomery County, Maryland, is quite prosperous, but wishes its school buses to make more than two runs per day. So the high school students are out at the curb early in the morning, since nobody wants the elementary school students out in half-light. The high school students--who would prefer to sleep in--are groggy from lack of sleep, the elementary school students--who wake early--have an extra hour at home to do nothing in particular. I don't know what the story is with the middle school kids.

I commuted to college long ago one winter with DST. I did not enjoy it. I'm not sure I'd have enjoyed it even living on campus.

> since nobody wants the elementary school students out in half-light

Lol why? What do they think happens at half-light?

Adding adequate street lighting near bus stops really isn't that hard.

Possibility of crimes in dark hours in crime-prone regions? It's hard to imagine if you don't experience it where you live.

is the one time of the day when every child and parent on the street is standing outside together really the best time to commit a crime, dark or otherwise?

Yep.

Or just close the schools permanently, sell the assets, commit to at-home learning or micro-schools.