> 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.