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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

If kids are a concern, what about the problem of DST in winter in northern areas meaning kids go to school in the dark?

For example I see kids walking to school at around 7:15 AM (6th-8th grade and high school) and around 8:30 AM (K-5th grade).

This is at latitude ~47.7° N (same latitude as the city that is part of your name, in fact).

Here is what various DST options would do in terms of kids going to school before sunrise:

                  Elementary:        Middle/High:
  No DST:           never           Nov 20th - Feb 10th
  Current DST:      never           Oct 10th - Mar 16th
  Permanent DST: Nov 23 - Feb 2nd   Oct 10th - Mar 16th

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This is just a problem of schools starting too early. You can't fix stupid. Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?

I agree that middle/high school is arguably starting too early (especially since research has shown, I believe, that teens really should be sleeping later).

In the case of elementary school, though, you are dealing with kids young enough that they probably cannot reliably be counted on the get ready and leave for school on their own, and so you need to fit school times in with their parent's work schedule.

As long as we're trying to fix all the world's problems, I'd submit that the ideal domestic partnership has one parent able to focus full-time on childcare and home life. It doesn't have to be the same parent all the time, but I find the expectation of dual incomes to be one of the great rip-offs of modern life.

Somewhere along the way to 10s, we lost the work flexibility. "I took care of my kids for 5 years" gets your CV discarded in an instant. So both parents, not always because they need the money, but very frequently because they're afraid to lose their career, choose to keep working.

Somewhere in the early 90s in these parts.

We should start a political party :-)

Middle/high does start too early, but if you started later, there wouldn't been enough time after school for those precious athletic team practices and games.

I went to school in the 90s-aughts in a school district where the median household income was ~15% below the national average. The rationale I always heard for the 7:45am high school start time was that some teenagers needed to work after school jobs to help support their families, and if school ended too late they would just drop out.

I know live in a wealthy school district (with very good athletic programs) and high school starts at 9am.

In both places at least some of the athletic/band programs started before school.

Just an anecdote though, I never heard that rationale from an official source.

There's certainly an option to make the school day shorter. I seem to remember a lot of dead time in my classroom days.

Athletics should obviously start early if they need the time - why hold the whole school hostage for them?

Everyone agrees that the schools start too early, but there are so many idiots who throw up reasons why they are afraid to change. It's like a mark twain novel of a small town in Misssissippi in the 1800s. In my town, the latest reason why we couldn't start later was "we'll mismatch for athletic events for schools from nearby towns". Then the other nearby school districts switched, and our asshole district said, its still too scary, and waited one more year, and now we are 40 minutes later. We should go another half hour later.

> Although isn't the idea of "permanent DST" an oxymoron?

It's slightly different from no-DST in that "the sun is directly above" is no longer approximately noon, ever; the TZ is effectively 1 hour off of what is should be and DST is abolished. (The sun would be overhead at ~1pm year-round.)

(It would also mean that during winter, in some locales, the sun would not rise until after 9am. I personally like seeing the sun in the morning.)

On the 47th parallel there's only 8.5 hours of daylight around the winter solstice so you pretty much have to choose one or the other. My high shcool's first bell was at 07:40 PM and final bell was sometime around 2:40 PM, but around 60% of the class did extracurriculars during the week that would get you out at 4-6 PM.

As other have pointed out, starting school later (around 8:30-9 AM) would have students coming in after sunrise, but then school would go until ~3:30 PM and you run the risk of all students getting home after dark during December and January.

I'm not sure what you mean, here in Michigan a large chunk of the school year (maybe 50% ?) the highschool/middleschoolers go to school in the dark. It usually dark for another hour or more.

It's the same here. The middle/high school kids here are in the dark for about 5 months. Going to permanent DST would not change anything for them. Dropping DST completely would reduce that to about 3 months. See the third column in my table for the details. The rows are when they go in the dark (1) if we got rid of DST completely, (2) if we keep it as it is, and (3) if we went to permanent DST.

It's elementary school kids that it would make a big difference with. Under the current system here they are always going to school after sunrise. If we went to permanent DST, they would be going in the dark for about 2.5 months.

Well, Michigan is also insanely far west in an insanely large timezone, not to mention northerly.

And Massachusetts, especially Boston, is insanely east in the same time zone. Hence the discussion. Not as Far East as the upper coast of Maine but relatively few people live there.

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