My highschool started at 7:0something. It was dark when we started and we didn’t have much light after either in the winter. They made all sorts of claims about how this was somehow helping prepare us for “the real world”. I’ve worked in tech since my early 20s and these days I wake up around 8am, but when we were going into the office for the past decade I’d almost never get in before 10am, and all of us in software jobs in Silicon Valley get paid more than those making the decisions at the school districts. It’s sad how out of touch they were and continue to be.