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But then it’s not so much sports. The real cause is it’s childcare while parents work.
In my family member’s district, that’s not even a consideration. And weirdly many in the district have a shared overall employer and work starts at 5am to 7am for many of them. Leaving the other parent to drop off or making kids ride the bus solo.
The only thing dictating the schedule is sports. You get some parents that complain about everything. Meaning a fraction of a percent will complain about school starting too early, too late, on days it’s too windy, on days the sun is too bright, whatever. Parents are super awful nowadays. But all that is noise. The only complaint en mass they get that isn’t political/vaccine/FoxNews is sports related. Game started too late/early, not enough fields for all the kids to practice. The million dollar astroturf is bent the wrong way now, and needs maintenance IMMEDIATELY.
There was a high school building that got severely flood damaged in a hail storm. Parts of it are still boarded up and not fixed. But the $30m+ stadium they don’t need is almost finished.
Yup. Spent high school in a relatively large city with dozens of high schools, had stadiums galore, and temp classrooms in porta-buildings that leaked all winter and sweltered in the spring and summer and most of the fall. No money to pay teachers aids, no COLA raises for educators, but somehow the football stadium screen got an upgrade regularly and shiny new jerseys and helmets for the sportos.
Sports in education is a cancer. (source: see NCAA.)
In my high school, the auditorium where we did school plays was falling apart. You literally couldn’t sit in a quarter of the seats. Meanwhile, the football team got a new private changing room with a jacuzzi.
We once got a $250 lumber budget for building sets rejected (with the rationale that we could just reuse the sets from last year, even though that was a totally different play from a different time period, nevermind completely disassembled). Meanwhile, the cheerleading squad was issued matching tracksuits with their names embroidered, including on the duffle bag it came in. Sports sucks up huge amounts of money from school budgets, and everyone else is left to fight over the rest.
whose* direct family member
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It’s a bit depressing to me that we’ve known this for at least twenty years, and possibly more and it’s still a problem.
A major concern has been busing. Even in normal times, districts use the same buses and drivers for students of all ages. They stagger start times to do that, with high schoolers arriving and leaving school earliest in the day. The idea is that they can handle being alone in the dark at a bus stop more readily than smaller children, and it also lets them get home first to help take care of younger siblings after school.
If high schools started as late as middle and elementary schools, that would likely mean strain on transportation resources. O’Connell said Nashville’s limited mass transit compounds the problem.
“That is one of the biggest issues to resolve,” he said.
This is basically it, school systems not wanting to buy the extra buses or hire the extra drivers they’d need.
Unfortunately I don’t see this ever being solved without a major cultural/financial shift in the USA towards properly funding education. Too much financial pressure to have fewer buses and fewer drivers. If my high school and middle school had started at the same time as the elementary, that’d be like 14 new buses alone at $60k-$110k a pop, not including driver wages and the diesel for each one…and we had more than one high school and middle school in our district. So it’d be more like 50 new buses, just to start HS and middle school at the same time as elementary. The cost would eat smaller districts alive. It’d be several million just to procure the buses new.
It’s baffling how many U.S problems can be traced back to car-oriented development.
Here in Sweden, dedicated school buses are uncommon - getting to school is usually a matter of walking when young, and then using the common public transportation when older, or biking, or a mix of those two.
Here’s how I got to school while growing up:
- Years 1 -6: school 0.4 km away, walked or biked
- Years 7-9: school 2 km away, biked or took the bus
- Years 10-12: school 9.1 km away, took the bus to school
Note that this was one of the most car-oriented cities in Sweden of about 100k people, meaning that this experience is probably unusually bad for Sweden.
I won’t argue that the US is exceedingly car-focused, but that’s partly because distances travelled are greater. When I was a kid, my elementary school was 2.6 miles (4.18 km) from my house, and many classmates would have been even further. I had classmates who had a 45 minute bus ride (time stretched by making multiple stops obviously). While I’m sure 5 year olds can bike 2.6 miles, it’s probably not ideal and certainly not ideal in snow/sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temps. Much of the US is just very spread out.
When I was at school, the bus was a charter from the company that ran the local public bus fleet. Every other time it was running public routes or just part of that companies reserve.
But this was in the UK, where dedicated school buses are exceptional.
Yeah you were lucky. I had to take public transport for the number 93 bus. Memories of queuing in the rain.
On the plus side, the bus was filled with pretty Japanese students going from their Hall of Residence to University.
In the school district that I live in (and where my kids attend school), elementary school starts earliest and middle/high school both start at roughly the same time.
I’ve found that this works really well since my youngest wakes up and is ready to go earliest anyways, I don’t have to adjust my schedule because they’re out of the house before I have to get to work and I would need after school care regardless. My older kids can more or less fend for themselves before school so I don’t need to worry about them while I get to work before they leave.
If elementary school started at 9 like high school and middle school I’d have to organize care for my youngest both before and after school since I’d be working at both times.
Thank you for the insight! Love reading comments that really get to the heart of an issue without all the emotional crap.
Your comment for example, I had never thought along those lines. Not an easy problem.
It should also say not every person has to be at their job at 9am plugging up the road for the same reason said teens are being dropped off by these parents.
These are just outdated practices left over from previous generations. No one even tries to change them at this point. It would be so refreshing to see these things start to make sense.
I can tell you my personal hypothesis as to why it happens in universities:
- Timetabling work 8–4
- Misery loves company
It has always been about work. It lines up with most morning shifts because no one can afford childcare.
They cite one reason, busses, for the issue? With no mention of sports? Bad reporting.
Because parents would then have to pay someone to babysit and then take their kids to school at the later time in addition to after school care. And why can’t parents go to work later? Same reason companies aren’t allowing work from home even though it’s proven that the majority of people are more productive. The managers need to justify their existence, so they have to have their employees all there at the same time. And for some reason society has decided that morning people are somehow better than everyone else.
In my experience talking with school officials and reading between the lines of BS that get fed out by them, you get to take your pick because all are true.
- sports are more valuable than the mental and physical health of all of the students. Boosters bring in fat stacks for the school and scholarships bring prestige and clout when it comes time to justify government spending.
- so the teens can get out of school early enough to be exploited for free childcare by parents.
- so they can be pushed into the labor force after school.
Really all of them are actual reasons that they start so early despite overwhelming research that starting later in the morning would lead to better academic outcomes and better long-term information retention.
Schools in the USA are not about education. They are conditioning centers to “prepare” kids for abusive expectations in post graduation employment.
Worked at a HS that started at 7 so kids could pick up their siblings after school. Many of them had jobs too - quite a few ended up being scheduled during the last class period too.
Schools in the USA are babysitting to keep the economy going. You can’t teach a class of 30. Students can do everything short of punch a teacher and you have to keep them in your room, so learning just doesn’t happen.
First it has to start early enough so parents can get kids off then get to work. Also, extra circular activities like sports and clubs, as well as parents wanting kids home when they are home.
Because kids need to be at school while parents work
Right, so they get home at 3pm, makes perfect sense
It roughly lines up with morning shifts, I guess? When I was working at a grocery store our morning shift was like 6-3 with an hour lunch. I don’t know how you make sure your kids actually go to school if you’re at work by 6, though… And if you work evenings (or overnights, for places that are still open 24 hours) it doesn’t help at all.
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My rationale for what? 9-5s were covered by implication in the comment I was replying to: if you work 9-5, it’s kind of awkward that the kids get off at 3. I was just saying that if you work mornings it’s kind of awkward that you probably have to leave before the kids do, and if you don’t work during the school day then the kids aren’t at school while you work.
Not sure what I’m parroting. The topic of this subthread is Grammaton Cleric’s assertion that “kids need to be at school while parents work,” so I’m just mentioning that for a lot of parents that already isn’t the case.
I don’t have an opinion on times they “should” be at school.
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I wasn’t defending kids being in school so early. I was just musing that it sort of lines up better than it does with 9-5s. Which is probably incidental.
Because parents have to go to work, and teens with boyfriends/girlfriends don’t know how to use condoms and can’t get abortions in some states. Also, used car prices and insurance make teens driving to school on their own unaffordable.
Easy. School isn’t for school. It’s a daycare with its hours offset from the working day, skewing early so parents can get their kids there before work. Kids spend 2 hours on a bus and 7 hours in a classroom every day because both of their parents have to work.
I’m pretty sure it just boils down to hatred of young people. “I had to get up early so you do too.”
Which is why I think we should amend the constitution to allow cruel and unusual punishments for people who utter the phrase “build a better world for our children.”
Just wondering friends in Canada and EU - when do your teens start the class day? I don’t doubt this is yet another thing US education gets wrong but just wondering how better funded education systems are doing things.
The UK here. I think classes started for me just before 9 but the school would generally open a little after 8 so parents could drop their kids off.
It’s worth mentioning we have a semi functioning public transport system so for all schools in urban areas, teenagers are expected to use that to get to school.
Out in the country school buses are still a thing though.
UK - typically 9 - 3:30 for primary and 9-9:30 until 3 - 4 for secondary. I live on a street with 1 primary, 2 secondaries and a college, so they’ve gotten together and agreed to stagger things to cause less disruption during start and end times.
But we also have a public transport system and safe roads that means most kids walk/cycle/bus in.
Germany it’s 8 am
Between 8:15 and 10am
Our regular middle schools start late. It can work. The reason they don’t do it for high school where it is needed most is sports.
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Teens brains aren’t wired to go to bed that early. It genuinely physiologically harder for the to fall asleep at the hours they are required to fall asleep to get adequate rest for school. Sure some kids will be perfectly fine going to bed at 10 and they’ll immediately fall asleep, wake up at 6 and be fine but a lot of teens and I mean a lot find that to be a Herculean task.
I speak from experience, to this day I cannot fall asleep before midnight unless I’ve been worked ragged and even then it’s difficult. When I was a teen I’d try and get enough sleep I really would but if I was to fall asleep at 10 I’d have to be in bed and trying to fall asleep by atleast 9 but probably 8 and even then there was no guarantees. On average throughout all of highschool I probably got 4 hrs per night.
