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Comment by lightbyte | Hacker News Reader

>In our distract the high school starts at 7am and the small kids start at 9am. This makes no sense to me at all. (I'm not a kid complaining, I'm a parent)

I was always under the impression this staggered start rate among school tiers was because they all share the same buses. If they all started at the same time they would need ~3x as many buses and bus drivers.

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It would make a lot more sense to have the small kids start at 7 and the high school start at 9. Elementary school kids are naturally larks while teenagers are notorious owls.

It would, but people start panicking because they don't want their six year old standing alone on a deserted street corner in the dark waiting for a school bus. Seattle changed it to do that last year, but honestly what the fuck makes sense about a 7am school start time for anyone? In Australia I didn't know anyone who started school before 8.30am, ever. And that start time was basically consistent for 12 years of schooling, public, private, elementary, high school, whatever. It is like discovering aliens to see how the US school system is arranged.

6 year olds don't stand alone waiting for the bus anymore, there's always a parent waiting with them even though it's safer today than when we waited outside by ourselves. Even 9-10 year olds commonly have parents waiting with them.

Well, it's usually parents making this complaint, so I assume that it is the parents who don't want to stand with their kids that have an issue.

There was no schoolbus system where I grew up in southern california, we only ever took the school bus for field trips. Is it really that common across the country for kids to get to school by bus? We always just rode our bikes or walked, or got driven by parents.

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