Because it make zero sense for everyone to have to get up an hour earlier. And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning.
I get the feeling that it's fairly common in US schools to have kids in before 8am, possibly even before 7am!
Is this because of the widespread school transport and the need to stagger the bus usage? In the UK it's quite rare to have school transport, with most kids at high school taking public transport, and at primary school either walking or being driven
I got the feeling from German textbooks at school that early starts were common in Europe too.
Early school hours are often a result of teachers' desires to get out of work early. Many teachers' unions include school hours in their bargaining/contracts.
Yeah, and that is because being a teacher is not just an incredibly mentally taxing job (made worse by the fact that class sizes are way too large) but also involves an awful lot of invisible after-school work: preparing and correcting exams, preparing class material, dealing with IEPs, following up with parents (particularly in financially or otherwise challenged families), organizing after-school and extra-curricular activities, dealing with other bureaucratic bullshit because the administration is understaffed...
Yes, it is commonplace for bussing to be staggered -- they often pick up a route for one school (maybe a high school), then run another route for another school (maybe an elementary school).
"And it makes no sense for kids to stand around in the dark at freezing cold bus stops every morning."
I mean, coats exist. We could make sure everyone has winter wear appropriate for the weather, and then it just won't be an issue. Kids here are out in it and are from a young age here (Norway).
It's easy to focus on abductions and forget all of the other relevant crime, which makes up the majority of it.
Yes abductions are low, but in many many areas crime as a whole is high, and children are often involved or impacted, and likely more so when they are stuck standing around in the dark.
I'm from the US - the midwest. It wasn't a big deal catching the bus when it was cold/dark there, either. We had lights at the bus stops, and half the time it was in front of the house. No big deal. We had coats, too. There are multiple programs to make sure kids have coats in the US, though they don't go far enough.
Most places in the US are pretty safe, by the way, though folks will swear they aren't.
When I was in school, there were absolutely kids who lacked basic necessities, including quality clothing. Clothing was also more expensive back then... but universal schooling means that we're also catering to the poorest of the poor.
Kids shouldn't be forced to start that early anyway. It's borderline child abuse imo. Maybe permanent DST will lead to school schedules that benefit children not adults.
It's actually the exact opposite. Permanent DST means that kids will be starting 1 hour earlier relative to sunrise, which is terrible for educational outcomes.
It's already bad. The issue isn't when you sleep up relative to the sun, but relative to your responsibilities. Some kids have to wake up before 6am not to keep up, which severely limits their options in the evenings and their phyiscal development.
We'd have to change work timing too, then, to facilitate dropoffs and parents who want to watch their kids at the bus stops. And at that point, we are back where we started. Better to just not mess with the time, and stick with standard time.
If you change what time people go to work from 8 am to 9 am then you will also be changing when they get home from 5pm to 6pm. Then you have lost that extra daylight in the evening, which was the entire point of the time change!
> And at that point, we are back where we started.
Except only for people at latitudes where it's worth doing. Those people are precisely where they started, and everyone else has a much simpler year-round standard time.
