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The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. For those sports to thrive, teams need to practice, in order for pr

The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. For those sports to thrive, teams need to practice, in order for practice to be efficient, it needs to be at least an hour. So 2 hours are allocated (suit up, practice, suit down). In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm. Now, pair that with the fact that most school districts don't have enough bus drivers for every school, they pair up. A single bus driver will start their day bussing high school, then will bus elementary school (which starts later in the day). So high school ends a little earlier so the bus drivers can bus the elementary school kids home after they bus the high school kids. In order for the kids in high school to end at 2:15pm for sports and to save money on bus driver employment and bus fleet, they have to start 2:15pm - 8hr: 6:15am. It's crazy. It was like that when I went to high school in the early 90s, it's still the same today.

hgsgm 4y ago
Huh? Sports can practice before school. And high school athletes don't need parental supervision. School hours are set by transportation needs, as you already observed.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  > Sports can practice before school Hilarious, given the original thread. School already starts far too early.
  - sidibe 4y ago
    No such thing as too early. Our public HS swim team used to do the water part at 6am then cross training (running or weight room) after school. Probably because of pool availability
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Swimming seems to have a tradition of pre-dawn practice times. I never understood that. Nobody uses the high school pool after school (unless there's a meet).
      - sidibe 4y ago
        No schools around here have pools, have to share the YMCA pools with other groups
    - layman51 4y ago
      You’re kidding right? To me, requiring students to wake up before 7 AM should be considered hazing.
      - mhb 4y ago
        No one's requiring kids to compete on a high school swim team.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        Replacing a generic "required" with "required to join a group/team" actually makes it sound more like hazing to me.
  - adrianmonk 4y ago
    They're saying that, rather than having school from 8am to 3pm and sports to 3pm to 5pm, you could have sports from 8am to 10am and school from 10am to 5pm, for example. In other words, have the students who do optional activities come in early rather than stay late. Then only some students come in early instead of all of them.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      If there is evidence that it is too early for kids that age, then its too early, and school-sponsored extra-curriculars shouldn’t be at that time. Have some of the non-teaching staff time that is usually blocked into full non-teaching days split into that time, and add more but shorter teaching days,
- greedo 4y ago
  School hours are set by tradition. My city provides no bus service to any students (excepting special needs kids). Crazy I know. Kids can ride the city metro buses for free, but those aren't the same as school buses.
  - prawn 4y ago
    What's the rationale for some schools having a bus service and others not? In Australia, I'm not aware of any metropolitan state school having a bus service, so it sounds bizarre that buses would dictate starting times. Some private schools might have small buses. Otherwise, public and private students would use public transport, ride, walk or get dropped off by parents.
    - mcv 4y ago
      In Netherland it's also only the special needs schools that pick up students in buses (because they're very specialised and kids can come from a very large area and might not be sufficiently able to travel on their own). But most kids just use their bike. But I gather bikes are not a thing in many other countries.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  In the Friday nights lights states, we lift every other morning at 6am, practice ends at 6pm
snapetom 4y ago
Uh, this is pretty much the case with other extra-curriculars, too. My school had a very strong and diverse performing arts program and kids often stayed late enough for parents to pick them up after work.
joezydeco 4y ago
This is exactly why. We've been at our administrators for years and the response always is "the bus routes" but in reality it's because of the sports schedules. High school sports is a drain on the educational system, plain and simple. It lacks equity - an disproportionate amount of money is spent on very few children. The football coach in our HS has a Vice Principal title, so he doesn't have to teach classes but knocks down $100K+ to run the team. There are maybe 120 kids in the football program, in a high school of 2000. If you look at Europe, sports clubs are run by outside groups and happen after school on their own resources. I'd love to see that here. I mean, we do have year-round club teams and that's another problem. Too many parents overload their kids with sports either because they're living through their kids, or they think it's a shot at a college scholarship. It burns the kids out and rarely turns into anything profitable.
- boringg 4y ago
  It's weird to discuss children as turning them into something profitable
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    When college costs six figures, you hope to break even. And that's a whole different ball of wax in America.
    - geraldwhen 4y ago
      Most state universities cost nothing near this, especially if you discount room and board. You need to live somewhere and eat, so it’s not sensible to include those costs with the cost of college.
      - Riseed 4y ago
        While students need somewhere to sleep and eat, the cost of doing so on campus are much higher than anywhere else (in my limited experience). For example, the cost of on-campus room and board my junior year was 4x the cost of my off-campus room and board the following year. Some schools don't allow for off-campus housing for some or all students, or still require commuters to purchase a meal plan. So perhaps while it's not sensible to include all room and board costs with the cost of college, it's definitely fair to include some or even most.
nicoburns 4y ago
> In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm Why would they need to be able to complete their sports before their parents get home?
- uncletaco 4y ago
  It was probably more accurate to say before their parents get off.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    I still don't really understand why this is important. Presumably kids aren't playing sports every day of the week, so they'll have plenty of time to spend with their parents on the other days. I used to play Tennis from something like 5pm to 7pm a couple of days a week when I was a kid and that didn't seem to cause any problems.
    - uncletaco 4y ago
      Practice is every day of the week in the US For high school football players it's basically practice Monday-Thursday then game on Friday. For basketball players it's basically any day during the week that they don't have a game. I was in marching band and we practiced after school every day.
      - mcv 4y ago
        Sorry, but that's insane. That's fine for high-level near-professional sports, but for some basic school sports, training every day is ridiculous and sacrificing the health and education of the students for it is just plain stupid. Why does this happen? Why does everything have to move for this? And if they really absolutely want to do this during daylight hours, why not have the sports before school, and have just the fanatical athletes show up really early while the other students can get a normal night's sleep?
twright0 4y ago
The reason that sports dictate school start times isn't difficulty in scheduling practices (since you could, at least on paper, put those practices before school starts rather than after). The problem is that sports are competitive between school districts, so you need shared non-school but school-adjacent time blocks between neighboring districts to schedule games in. Shifting one district much later (to run 9-5, for example) would make it impossible for that school to compete with others after school, which is going to be a practical nonstarter. In my mind, this is one of the biggest obstacles to changing school timing significantly. Most other objections are internal to a school district, so a single motivated school board could tackle and fix them, but this problem requires coordination between many different school districts all at once.
uncletaco 4y ago
Same principle but it was different in my schools system. High school starts 30 minutes after elementary and middle school.
JenrHywy 4y ago
6:15? Holy crap. High school here (Australia) starts at 8:50. And even then I think that's too early for natural teenage sleep patterns. My kids are lucky in that we're close enough to school that they can leave at around 8:15. When I was in high school I had to get the bus at 7:30, which was a real struggle. The idea of starting school at 6:15 is just pure insanity.
- calt 4y ago
  My public school in the US always started at 8:00. I've never heard of a 6:15 start time. Also, school was never a full 8 hours. So I'm confused about their reasoning.
  - anthomtb 4y ago
    I am going on 2 decades removed from my American high school, so maybe things have changed. But I also recall starting school within +/- 10 minutes of 8:00 AM. The only exception was strictly extracurricular, a men's choir which practiced between 7:00 and 8:00 AM. The expectation, implicitly, was that parents or friends were going to be the ones getting you there.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    My high schools first period started around 7:20. Not as bad a 6, but still too early IMO.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  I took an optional extra class at 630. It wasn’t bad; I just went to sleep earlier to compensate.
- myko 4y ago
  As a middle / HS student in the rural US I got on my bus at 5:55 to start school at 7:30. When I wasn't in sports I would leave school at 2:30 on the bus and get home at 4:30 (we stopped at the elementary school to pick them up and take them home in the afternoons). When I had sports I would usually get home from practice at around 6-630 at night. Ideal time management would mean I'd eat and do an hour or two of homework, but usually I'd stay up until ~2AM using dialup internet to MUD with friends. I was exhausted! Playing MUD did help lead me to my career though, so I suppose it wasn't all bad.
asdff 4y ago
In my high school we had a few "competitive" sports teams, which really meant just absolute suffering. Kids would be waking up for 2 hours of swim practice before class, where they would be puking on the edge of the pool, followed by more practice after class, then they had to you know do the whole homework part time job and get into college thing in whatever time is left. Wrestling was just as bad but the kids would starve themselves or wear trashbags under hoodies during the day to make weight on tournaments, along with chewing tobacco to spit more water. At least our football team and basketball teams sucked enough for the players to never take practice or games seriously.
jay_kyburz 4y ago
>The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. No its not, the article clearly states teenagers need 9 hours of sleep. If you choose to get up at 5am you just need to be in bed by 8pm. If you don't want to go to bed at 8, don't do sport and get up at 5. The parents and students themselves when they try and do too much.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  What do you mean choose? They don't get to choose when school starts. Even setting aside how hard it is for a teenager to sleep that early.
kenjackson 4y ago
I'd buy this if schools with virtually no sports teams had 9am or later start times. In Seattle there are private schools that could start whenver they want with virtually extra curriculars who also start at 8am. Additionally most sports teams don't have practice ending at 5pm. My sons basketball team didn't end until 6:30, because they have study hall for the athletes right after school. Your assertion just doesn't ring true.
- watwut 4y ago
  European high schools commonly start at 8. So, the idea that it is something specific to USA in opposition to other countries does not sound right.
Etheryte 4y ago
I'm not convinced this is the real root cause, this is just a reasonable sounding theory that's easy to nod along to. Other countries don't follow this time pattern and have extra curricular activities and nonsense school hours all the same. As a single data point, where I'm from you usually have a gap after school so you can do your homework and then you do extra activities in the evening. Transportation is handled by public transport so everyone can come and go as they need and please.
- runarberg 4y ago
  I agree, I think the culture around kids activity is not optimal in the US, and I think the primary culprit is weird urban planning. Schools are often located far away from population centers, and there is no walking and biking infrastructure for kids to get them selves there safely, so they have a massive amount of school buses to make up for that, and the whole schedule and culture is organized around limitation with school buses and drivers. In Europe it is normal that school and kids culture is detached. There are cultural activities (including sports) which kids get them self to after school. In USA all these activities are organized by the school it self and if it is outside of the school area, a school bus is organized to take kids there. This could be so much easier if they would just build the schools close enough to population centers with enough biking and walking infrastructure that kids could get there by them selves.
  - watwut 4y ago
    Do high schools in Europe start significantly later then in US? Germany, Czech and Poland starts at 8:00.
    - runarberg 4y ago
      In Iceland they start between 8:00 and 9:00 (and being on permanent DST this is actually worse in Iceland). So like my parent said, sports (and other kids culture) are not the reason for sleep depriving teenagers, they are merely an additional contributor. I just felt the need to state the difference in culture here, where US kids activities are really tightly coupled with school activities. While in Europe a simple change in policy—often just on a school administration level—is needed, while in the USA, this is way more complicated.
irrational 4y ago
Exactly. I’m not a sports person, so I’m in favor of cancelling all sports. But I also realize that is a non-starter since so many more people (for reasons I don’t understand) want school sports.
chongli 4y ago
That's really strange. Where I live the high schools do not provide bus service at all. There are city bus stops in front of the high schools and high school students get a big discount when they buy a student transit pass. Yet we still have the high school students starting at ungodly early hours in the morning!
LastTrain 4y ago
That's good but early start times are not exclusive to the US or places where sports and bussing introduce the same kinds of constraints. There are more convincing explanations for this, such as: it doesn't work when kids have to be to school at the same time parents need to be at work - staggering the morning routine and drop-off times and all. Plus, who is starting school at 6:15? Are you talking about an opt-in zero hour? That is by choice. If starting that early is bad for your academics or health, the choice is clear, drop the sport.
logicfiction 4y ago
Why does high school have to go first in the morning? When I was in elementary school I would wake up at 5:30-6am naturally and watch TV before school. Come high school and I was constantly not getting enough sleep with the earlier start times and setting my own bed times. I think high school aged children have more need for a later start than elementary school aged children.
scruple 4y ago
I agree with your specific point but my experience with obscene lack of sleep during my high school years was owed to extracirculars in general. On top of athletics, I was also part of Men's Glee (and symphony choir, and swing choir for a year) in high school. Men's Glee formed while I was in the 10th grade and the only time we had to practice was before classes because all of us were also already involved in other sports and extra curriculars. 10th through 12th grade I was awake at 5:45AM to get to school by 6:15 to practice from 6:30 til 7:15/7:30. There were at least half of a dozen other grouoa starting before school for the same reasons. I was also in swing choir my 11th grade year and we met after sports practice ended. A handful of us had days that started at school around 6:15AM and ended around 7:30PM! These choirs were good and competitive at the (Ohio) state level but in retrospect I'd have rather slept later. In the case of swing choir, it was very much that I just wanted to leave the school grounds at a reasonable hour.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  My experience was similar. Honors choir 6:45-7:45, school from 8:00-3:15, athletics (basketball, football, or track) from 3:30-5:30, and theater from 6:00-8:00. With homework on top, those were very long days. Why did I do it? To distinguish myself from the masses with the hope of landing scholarships. And it worked. Only paid for state school, but things have turned out well twenty-five years later. hard work pays off. Yes, I would have rather slept in. I'm glad I didn't.
thebradbain 4y ago
I went to highschool in the early 2010s, and I started 8:30am. Sports would start at 2:45. Senior year, because of the stress of college applications, we would start at 10am (you could still take the bus and use the extra time to meet with the college counselor if you wanted). It seems much more humane. Why does the class portion of the day _need_ to be 8 hours long? My school is still considered one of the highest-ranked in Texas, if that matters, where it’s not uncommon for 25%+ of a graduating class to go on to Ivy’s, so I question if it’s really necessary to be sitting in class for longer than that in the first place.
hintymad 4y ago
> The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. It seems the real blame is the culture of the US, which values sports above many things. Case in point, people openly despise toiling in academia, yet praise highly toiling in sports. Sports jockeys are popular in schools, yet IMO medalists are not (not that I care. Just to contrast culture differences). It's not enough to get into an Ivy if you are in top positions of AIME, but boy you're going to an Ivy school if are the captain of your school's whatever team.
- temporarara 4y ago
  The fact that there are universities that strongly favor athletes feels so absurd to me. In my country you could be a world class athlete and it gives you exactly zero extra points when applying to any university here. Academic success and the possible entry exams are the only things that are considered. All "extra curricular activities" are completely ignored, the mindset being that if they truly are relevant they help you in indirect ways to achieve the required level anyway. I think that's how it should be everywhere, but ofc I'm biased here. And I do like sports, both watching and playing. It feels just wrong that somewhere kids have to market themselves into university by carefully choosing what they do in their free time, just having good grades (and actual knowledge/skills) is not enough.
  - hintymad 4y ago
    Because sports is a hugely profitable business for universities. And it is profitable precisely because American people just are so into sports. So it's a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on how you look at it. My view is actually in the middle: admit national talent, but ignore anyone below that level. This is just how sports works. No one knows who was the 100th place in Tour de France, even though that person is probably just one second behind the 1st place.
    - temporarara 4y ago
      I still think universities should not be into profiting from sports. It's so weird that they are combined in some countries. After all being even exceptionally good at sports does not in any way imply that you belong into university level education in the first place. Universities should be about higher education and research.
mcv 4y ago
But teenagers can easily train for sports in the evenings. Plenty of sport clubs here train in the early evening around here. Most afternoon activities start around 4 or 5. The local scouting clubs start at 18:30 or later even for primary school kids (which does sound a bit late to me).
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Sounds very American, but here in Canada (and many other western countries) we have the same awful hours but without the same insane level of obsession with school sports as in the US. So I dunno, doesn't sound fully explanatory.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  here in Canada (and many other western countries) we have the same awful hours but without the same insane level of obsession with school sports as in the US I've followed hockey rather closely for many decades, and respectfully, wow. The stories I've read about youth hockey seem absolutely mental to me. Kids staying with other families (billets) hundreds of miles from home just to play hockey, etc. Bullying, abusive coaches, etc. Rampant sexual assaults. Of course many kids (the vast majority, I'm sure) have healthy experiences too. This is not to say that either the US or Canada are better than the other in this regard, but it always seems to me that they were cut from similar cloth. Talking about the US' "obsession with school sports" made me laugh. Usually we're painted as a sedentary nation of morbidly obese children. But apparently we're also obsessed with playing sports. Maybe Hollywood is to blame; we've all seen countless movies where the entire school is obsessed with some football game or whatever. All I can really say is that school sports teams are completely optional. Most kids don't even participate or even care.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Yeah hockey in Canada... JFC. Especially small-town/rural Canada -- is a whole other thing. I personally grew up relatively sheltered from it, and my own kids don't participate or care -- but I grew up in rural Alberta and when I got to high school and saw how many kids around me... that was their whole life, I was kind of shocked. But it was at least a clear cultural demarcation line ... the people I liked and hung out with had nothing to do with hockey/sportsing, the people who were rampant violent homophobes ... were. So, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that hockey is an obsession for hockey families. For everyone else... kind of a shrug. What I'm always shocked with with the US is the degree to which just almost everyone is into football. It's some sort of bizarre national religion, and a default smalltalk conversation topic. When I go skiing with friends in the US and we go up a chairlift with strangers, it seems almost always the icebreaker convo. When I worked at Google I was always surprised to find total CS "nerds" strike up a convo about football.
oblio 4y ago
It's not that... it's parents' start times at work. A lot of places have very rigid work schedules and schools need to account for a certain percentage of parents dropping kids off and then driving to school. Kids are sacrificed because, surprise-surprise, they have no real say in the matter.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  I kindly disagree with your last statement as I see it clashing with the rest of your comment. Kids are powerless in the decision making. Most guardians/parents are too. As you alluded to, "both parents working" + "commute time" = outcome. This is the rat race in action. Everyone wanting to one up everyone else. To be the top %. To get into the best colleges etc. And so it goes. I don't see a solution unless it somehow rewrites the rules of the rat race. IE government communal action.
usefulcat 4y ago
That’s crazy (6:15 start time). Where did you go to school? I also graduated early 90s and our schedule was always 8:10 - 3:10. This was in TX, where football is king and education spending is not.
crazygringo 4y ago
Wait, 8 hrs of classes? My high school was 8 am to 2:15 pm, only slightly more than 6 hours. I've never heard of a school day that was 8 hours long of classes. Also, I don't know many office jobs where employees are home by 5 pm either. If you have a 9:30-4:00 school day with 4:00-6:00 for sports, is that a problem? Family dinner at 6:30 or 7:00 pm.
zoomablemind 4y ago
Quoting from the article: "...A delayed school start could also mean adults with inflexible work schedules are late for work." In my view, the whole school system largely appears to be a way to safely contain our kids, while we're working hard in the offices or elsewhere. So traditional inflexibility of office working arrangements (opening times often tied to other points of economy, like store or market hours) reflects onto the school starting times. This is especially exacerbated by work commute times. I was once shocked to learn that some suburbian colleagues had to wake up before 5am in order to be ready in the downtown office by 8am; yep, they would drop off their kids at school too before taking train to the city, that is the kids would start before 8am or at least go for an early drop-off, either way being already awake. Perhaps the remote work could make this more bearable but most of working parents would rather keep the established school starting hours as being fitting "ok". As for the kids, they just learn to dread the start of another school day and clockwatching it till the end.
- taco2081 4y ago
  It's exactly this, most office jobs, whether we like it or not, are 9-5. Parents need to be around to see their kids to the bus or in many cases drop them off themselves. I'm not surprised that the top commment of an HN thread is blaming sports though...
jacobsenscott 4y ago
In my school district elementary school starts first, around 8Am, then High School around 8:20, and finally middle school around 8:50. This is a fairly recent change, and result of these studies (high school used to start first). So some districts do try.
poulsbohemian 4y ago
Counter argument: In our district, about 3 years ago, there was a realignment of the schedule. It revolved around cost savings for transportation, but it became just as clear that there was a secondary issue: Day care. Parents need to be able to get to work early and work late, and the school district has stepped in to provide this coverage. Also, by pushing the start times earlier and changing transportation* the district saved about $400K/ year - which is a lot for our district. * What the district really did was reduce the number of bus drivers to the minimum needed, as they couldn't actually afford them or find enough people willing to take on a part-time job with weird hours. This really meant more parents providing transportation before going to work, IE: the schedule became a chicken-egg problem.

hgsgm 4y ago

Huh? Sports can practice before school. And high school athletes don't need parental supervision. School hours are set by transportation needs, as you already observed.

deanCommie 4y ago
> Sports can practice before school Hilarious, given the original thread. School already starts far too early.
- sidibe 4y ago
  No such thing as too early. Our public HS swim team used to do the water part at 6am then cross training (running or weight room) after school. Probably because of pool availability
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Swimming seems to have a tradition of pre-dawn practice times. I never understood that. Nobody uses the high school pool after school (unless there's a meet).
    - sidibe 4y ago
      No schools around here have pools, have to share the YMCA pools with other groups
  - layman51 4y ago
    You’re kidding right? To me, requiring students to wake up before 7 AM should be considered hazing.
    - mhb 4y ago
      No one's requiring kids to compete on a high school swim team.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        Replacing a generic "required" with "required to join a group/team" actually makes it sound more like hazing to me.
- adrianmonk 4y ago
  They're saying that, rather than having school from 8am to 3pm and sports to 3pm to 5pm, you could have sports from 8am to 10am and school from 10am to 5pm, for example. In other words, have the students who do optional activities come in early rather than stay late. Then only some students come in early instead of all of them.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    If there is evidence that it is too early for kids that age, then its too early, and school-sponsored extra-curriculars shouldn’t be at that time. Have some of the non-teaching staff time that is usually blocked into full non-teaching days split into that time, and add more but shorter teaching days,
greedo 4y ago
School hours are set by tradition. My city provides no bus service to any students (excepting special needs kids). Crazy I know. Kids can ride the city metro buses for free, but those aren't the same as school buses.
- prawn 4y ago
  What's the rationale for some schools having a bus service and others not? In Australia, I'm not aware of any metropolitan state school having a bus service, so it sounds bizarre that buses would dictate starting times. Some private schools might have small buses. Otherwise, public and private students would use public transport, ride, walk or get dropped off by parents.
  - mcv 4y ago
    In Netherland it's also only the special needs schools that pick up students in buses (because they're very specialised and kids can come from a very large area and might not be sufficiently able to travel on their own). But most kids just use their bike. But I gather bikes are not a thing in many other countries.
smileysteve 4y ago
In the Friday nights lights states, we lift every other morning at 6am, practice ends at 6pm

snapetom 4y ago

Uh, this is pretty much the case with other extra-curriculars, too. My school had a very strong and diverse performing arts program and kids often stayed late enough for parents to pick them up after work.

joezydeco 4y ago

This is exactly why. We've been at our administrators for years and the response always is "the bus routes" but in reality it's because of the sports schedules. High school sports is a drain on the educational system, plain and simple. It lacks equity - an disproportionate amount of money is spent on very few children. The football coach in our HS has a Vice Principal title, so he doesn't have to teach classes but knocks down $100K+ to run the team. There are maybe 120 kids in the football program, in a high school of 2000. If you look at Europe, sports clubs are run by outside groups and happen after school on their own resources. I'd love to see that here. I mean, we do have year-round club teams and that's another problem. Too many parents overload their kids with sports either because they're living through their kids, or they think it's a shot at a college scholarship. It burns the kids out and rarely turns into anything profitable.

boringg 4y ago
It's weird to discuss children as turning them into something profitable
- joezydeco 4y ago
  When college costs six figures, you hope to break even. And that's a whole different ball of wax in America.
  - geraldwhen 4y ago
    Most state universities cost nothing near this, especially if you discount room and board. You need to live somewhere and eat, so it’s not sensible to include those costs with the cost of college.
    - Riseed 4y ago
      While students need somewhere to sleep and eat, the cost of doing so on campus are much higher than anywhere else (in my limited experience). For example, the cost of on-campus room and board my junior year was 4x the cost of my off-campus room and board the following year. Some schools don't allow for off-campus housing for some or all students, or still require commuters to purchase a meal plan. So perhaps while it's not sensible to include all room and board costs with the cost of college, it's definitely fair to include some or even most.

nicoburns 4y ago

> In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm Why would they need to be able to complete their sports before their parents get home?

uncletaco 4y ago
It was probably more accurate to say before their parents get off.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I still don't really understand why this is important. Presumably kids aren't playing sports every day of the week, so they'll have plenty of time to spend with their parents on the other days. I used to play Tennis from something like 5pm to 7pm a couple of days a week when I was a kid and that didn't seem to cause any problems.
  - uncletaco 4y ago
    Practice is every day of the week in the US For high school football players it's basically practice Monday-Thursday then game on Friday. For basketball players it's basically any day during the week that they don't have a game. I was in marching band and we practiced after school every day.
    - mcv 4y ago
      Sorry, but that's insane. That's fine for high-level near-professional sports, but for some basic school sports, training every day is ridiculous and sacrificing the health and education of the students for it is just plain stupid. Why does this happen? Why does everything have to move for this? And if they really absolutely want to do this during daylight hours, why not have the sports before school, and have just the fanatical athletes show up really early while the other students can get a normal night's sleep?

twright0 4y ago

The reason that sports dictate school start times isn't difficulty in scheduling practices (since you could, at least on paper, put those practices before school starts rather than after). The problem is that sports are competitive between school districts, so you need shared non-school but school-adjacent time blocks between neighboring districts to schedule games in. Shifting one district much later (to run 9-5, for example) would make it impossible for that school to compete with others after school, which is going to be a practical nonstarter. In my mind, this is one of the biggest obstacles to changing school timing significantly. Most other objections are internal to a school district, so a single motivated school board could tackle and fix them, but this problem requires coordination between many different school districts all at once.

uncletaco 4y ago

Same principle but it was different in my schools system. High school starts 30 minutes after elementary and middle school.

JenrHywy 4y ago

6:15? Holy crap. High school here (Australia) starts at 8:50. And even then I think that's too early for natural teenage sleep patterns. My kids are lucky in that we're close enough to school that they can leave at around 8:15. When I was in high school I had to get the bus at 7:30, which was a real struggle. The idea of starting school at 6:15 is just pure insanity.

calt 4y ago
My public school in the US always started at 8:00. I've never heard of a 6:15 start time. Also, school was never a full 8 hours. So I'm confused about their reasoning.
- anthomtb 4y ago
  I am going on 2 decades removed from my American high school, so maybe things have changed. But I also recall starting school within +/- 10 minutes of 8:00 AM. The only exception was strictly extracurricular, a men's choir which practiced between 7:00 and 8:00 AM. The expectation, implicitly, was that parents or friends were going to be the ones getting you there.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  My high schools first period started around 7:20. Not as bad a 6, but still too early IMO.
geraldwhen 4y ago
I took an optional extra class at 630. It wasn’t bad; I just went to sleep earlier to compensate.
myko 4y ago
As a middle / HS student in the rural US I got on my bus at 5:55 to start school at 7:30. When I wasn't in sports I would leave school at 2:30 on the bus and get home at 4:30 (we stopped at the elementary school to pick them up and take them home in the afternoons). When I had sports I would usually get home from practice at around 6-630 at night. Ideal time management would mean I'd eat and do an hour or two of homework, but usually I'd stay up until ~2AM using dialup internet to MUD with friends. I was exhausted! Playing MUD did help lead me to my career though, so I suppose it wasn't all bad.

asdff 4y ago

In my high school we had a few "competitive" sports teams, which really meant just absolute suffering. Kids would be waking up for 2 hours of swim practice before class, where they would be puking on the edge of the pool, followed by more practice after class, then they had to you know do the whole homework part time job and get into college thing in whatever time is left. Wrestling was just as bad but the kids would starve themselves or wear trashbags under hoodies during the day to make weight on tournaments, along with chewing tobacco to spit more water. At least our football team and basketball teams sucked enough for the players to never take practice or games seriously.

jay_kyburz 4y ago

>The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. No its not, the article clearly states teenagers need 9 hours of sleep. If you choose to get up at 5am you just need to be in bed by 8pm. If you don't want to go to bed at 8, don't do sport and get up at 5. The parents and students themselves when they try and do too much.

Dylan16807 4y ago
What do you mean choose? They don't get to choose when school starts. Even setting aside how hard it is for a teenager to sleep that early.

kenjackson 4y ago

I'd buy this if schools with virtually no sports teams had 9am or later start times. In Seattle there are private schools that could start whenver they want with virtually extra curriculars who also start at 8am. Additionally most sports teams don't have practice ending at 5pm. My sons basketball team didn't end until 6:30, because they have study hall for the athletes right after school. Your assertion just doesn't ring true.

watwut 4y ago
European high schools commonly start at 8. So, the idea that it is something specific to USA in opposition to other countries does not sound right.

Etheryte 4y ago

I'm not convinced this is the real root cause, this is just a reasonable sounding theory that's easy to nod along to. Other countries don't follow this time pattern and have extra curricular activities and nonsense school hours all the same. As a single data point, where I'm from you usually have a gap after school so you can do your homework and then you do extra activities in the evening. Transportation is handled by public transport so everyone can come and go as they need and please.

runarberg 4y ago
I agree, I think the culture around kids activity is not optimal in the US, and I think the primary culprit is weird urban planning. Schools are often located far away from population centers, and there is no walking and biking infrastructure for kids to get them selves there safely, so they have a massive amount of school buses to make up for that, and the whole schedule and culture is organized around limitation with school buses and drivers. In Europe it is normal that school and kids culture is detached. There are cultural activities (including sports) which kids get them self to after school. In USA all these activities are organized by the school it self and if it is outside of the school area, a school bus is organized to take kids there. This could be so much easier if they would just build the schools close enough to population centers with enough biking and walking infrastructure that kids could get there by them selves.
- watwut 4y ago
  Do high schools in Europe start significantly later then in US? Germany, Czech and Poland starts at 8:00.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    In Iceland they start between 8:00 and 9:00 (and being on permanent DST this is actually worse in Iceland). So like my parent said, sports (and other kids culture) are not the reason for sleep depriving teenagers, they are merely an additional contributor. I just felt the need to state the difference in culture here, where US kids activities are really tightly coupled with school activities. While in Europe a simple change in policy—often just on a school administration level—is needed, while in the USA, this is way more complicated.

irrational 4y ago

Exactly. I’m not a sports person, so I’m in favor of cancelling all sports. But I also realize that is a non-starter since so many more people (for reasons I don’t understand) want school sports.

chongli 4y ago

That's really strange. Where I live the high schools do not provide bus service at all. There are city bus stops in front of the high schools and high school students get a big discount when they buy a student transit pass. Yet we still have the high school students starting at ungodly early hours in the morning!

LastTrain 4y ago

That's good but early start times are not exclusive to the US or places where sports and bussing introduce the same kinds of constraints. There are more convincing explanations for this, such as: it doesn't work when kids have to be to school at the same time parents need to be at work - staggering the morning routine and drop-off times and all. Plus, who is starting school at 6:15? Are you talking about an opt-in zero hour? That is by choice. If starting that early is bad for your academics or health, the choice is clear, drop the sport.

logicfiction 4y ago

Why does high school have to go first in the morning? When I was in elementary school I would wake up at 5:30-6am naturally and watch TV before school. Come high school and I was constantly not getting enough sleep with the earlier start times and setting my own bed times. I think high school aged children have more need for a later start than elementary school aged children.

scruple 4y ago

I agree with your specific point but my experience with obscene lack of sleep during my high school years was owed to extracirculars in general. On top of athletics, I was also part of Men's Glee (and symphony choir, and swing choir for a year) in high school. Men's Glee formed while I was in the 10th grade and the only time we had to practice was before classes because all of us were also already involved in other sports and extra curriculars. 10th through 12th grade I was awake at 5:45AM to get to school by 6:15 to practice from 6:30 til 7:15/7:30. There were at least half of a dozen other grouoa starting before school for the same reasons. I was also in swing choir my 11th grade year and we met after sports practice ended. A handful of us had days that started at school around 6:15AM and ended around 7:30PM! These choirs were good and competitive at the (Ohio) state level but in retrospect I'd have rather slept later. In the case of swing choir, it was very much that I just wanted to leave the school grounds at a reasonable hour.

hcurtiss 4y ago
My experience was similar. Honors choir 6:45-7:45, school from 8:00-3:15, athletics (basketball, football, or track) from 3:30-5:30, and theater from 6:00-8:00. With homework on top, those were very long days. Why did I do it? To distinguish myself from the masses with the hope of landing scholarships. And it worked. Only paid for state school, but things have turned out well twenty-five years later. hard work pays off. Yes, I would have rather slept in. I'm glad I didn't.

thebradbain 4y ago

I went to highschool in the early 2010s, and I started 8:30am. Sports would start at 2:45. Senior year, because of the stress of college applications, we would start at 10am (you could still take the bus and use the extra time to meet with the college counselor if you wanted). It seems much more humane. Why does the class portion of the day _need_ to be 8 hours long? My school is still considered one of the highest-ranked in Texas, if that matters, where it’s not uncommon for 25%+ of a graduating class to go on to Ivy’s, so I question if it’s really necessary to be sitting in class for longer than that in the first place.

hintymad 4y ago

> The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. It seems the real blame is the culture of the US, which values sports above many things. Case in point, people openly despise toiling in academia, yet praise highly toiling in sports. Sports jockeys are popular in schools, yet IMO medalists are not (not that I care. Just to contrast culture differences). It's not enough to get into an Ivy if you are in top positions of AIME, but boy you're going to an Ivy school if are the captain of your school's whatever team.

temporarara 4y ago
The fact that there are universities that strongly favor athletes feels so absurd to me. In my country you could be a world class athlete and it gives you exactly zero extra points when applying to any university here. Academic success and the possible entry exams are the only things that are considered. All "extra curricular activities" are completely ignored, the mindset being that if they truly are relevant they help you in indirect ways to achieve the required level anyway. I think that's how it should be everywhere, but ofc I'm biased here. And I do like sports, both watching and playing. It feels just wrong that somewhere kids have to market themselves into university by carefully choosing what they do in their free time, just having good grades (and actual knowledge/skills) is not enough.
- hintymad 4y ago
  Because sports is a hugely profitable business for universities. And it is profitable precisely because American people just are so into sports. So it's a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on how you look at it. My view is actually in the middle: admit national talent, but ignore anyone below that level. This is just how sports works. No one knows who was the 100th place in Tour de France, even though that person is probably just one second behind the 1st place.
  - temporarara 4y ago
    I still think universities should not be into profiting from sports. It's so weird that they are combined in some countries. After all being even exceptionally good at sports does not in any way imply that you belong into university level education in the first place. Universities should be about higher education and research.

mcv 4y ago

But teenagers can easily train for sports in the evenings. Plenty of sport clubs here train in the early evening around here. Most afternoon activities start around 4 or 5. The local scouting clubs start at 18:30 or later even for primary school kids (which does sound a bit late to me).

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

Sounds very American, but here in Canada (and many other western countries) we have the same awful hours but without the same insane level of obsession with school sports as in the US. So I dunno, doesn't sound fully explanatory.

JohnBooty 4y ago
here in Canada (and many other western countries) we have the same awful hours but without the same insane level of obsession with school sports as in the US I've followed hockey rather closely for many decades, and respectfully, wow. The stories I've read about youth hockey seem absolutely mental to me. Kids staying with other families (billets) hundreds of miles from home just to play hockey, etc. Bullying, abusive coaches, etc. Rampant sexual assaults. Of course many kids (the vast majority, I'm sure) have healthy experiences too. This is not to say that either the US or Canada are better than the other in this regard, but it always seems to me that they were cut from similar cloth. Talking about the US' "obsession with school sports" made me laugh. Usually we're painted as a sedentary nation of morbidly obese children. But apparently we're also obsessed with playing sports. Maybe Hollywood is to blame; we've all seen countless movies where the entire school is obsessed with some football game or whatever. All I can really say is that school sports teams are completely optional. Most kids don't even participate or even care.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Yeah hockey in Canada... JFC. Especially small-town/rural Canada -- is a whole other thing. I personally grew up relatively sheltered from it, and my own kids don't participate or care -- but I grew up in rural Alberta and when I got to high school and saw how many kids around me... that was their whole life, I was kind of shocked. But it was at least a clear cultural demarcation line ... the people I liked and hung out with had nothing to do with hockey/sportsing, the people who were rampant violent homophobes ... were. So, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that hockey is an obsession for hockey families. For everyone else... kind of a shrug. What I'm always shocked with with the US is the degree to which just almost everyone is into football. It's some sort of bizarre national religion, and a default smalltalk conversation topic. When I go skiing with friends in the US and we go up a chairlift with strangers, it seems almost always the icebreaker convo. When I worked at Google I was always surprised to find total CS "nerds" strike up a convo about football.

oblio 4y ago

It's not that... it's parents' start times at work. A lot of places have very rigid work schedules and schools need to account for a certain percentage of parents dropping kids off and then driving to school. Kids are sacrificed because, surprise-surprise, they have no real say in the matter.

_carbyau_ 4y ago
I kindly disagree with your last statement as I see it clashing with the rest of your comment. Kids are powerless in the decision making. Most guardians/parents are too. As you alluded to, "both parents working" + "commute time" = outcome. This is the rat race in action. Everyone wanting to one up everyone else. To be the top %. To get into the best colleges etc. And so it goes. I don't see a solution unless it somehow rewrites the rules of the rat race. IE government communal action.

usefulcat 4y ago

That’s crazy (6:15 start time). Where did you go to school? I also graduated early 90s and our schedule was always 8:10 - 3:10. This was in TX, where football is king and education spending is not.

crazygringo 4y ago

Wait, 8 hrs of classes? My high school was 8 am to 2:15 pm, only slightly more than 6 hours. I've never heard of a school day that was 8 hours long of classes. Also, I don't know many office jobs where employees are home by 5 pm either. If you have a 9:30-4:00 school day with 4:00-6:00 for sports, is that a problem? Family dinner at 6:30 or 7:00 pm.

zoomablemind 4y ago

Quoting from the article: "...A delayed school start could also mean adults with inflexible work schedules are late for work." In my view, the whole school system largely appears to be a way to safely contain our kids, while we're working hard in the offices or elsewhere. So traditional inflexibility of office working arrangements (opening times often tied to other points of economy, like store or market hours) reflects onto the school starting times. This is especially exacerbated by work commute times. I was once shocked to learn that some suburbian colleagues had to wake up before 5am in order to be ready in the downtown office by 8am; yep, they would drop off their kids at school too before taking train to the city, that is the kids would start before 8am or at least go for an early drop-off, either way being already awake. Perhaps the remote work could make this more bearable but most of working parents would rather keep the established school starting hours as being fitting "ok". As for the kids, they just learn to dread the start of another school day and clockwatching it till the end.

taco2081 4y ago
It's exactly this, most office jobs, whether we like it or not, are 9-5. Parents need to be around to see their kids to the bus or in many cases drop them off themselves. I'm not surprised that the top commment of an HN thread is blaming sports though...

jacobsenscott 4y ago

In my school district elementary school starts first, around 8Am, then High School around 8:20, and finally middle school around 8:50. This is a fairly recent change, and result of these studies (high school used to start first). So some districts do try.

poulsbohemian 4y ago

Counter argument: In our district, about 3 years ago, there was a realignment of the schedule. It revolved around cost savings for transportation, but it became just as clear that there was a secondary issue: Day care. Parents need to be able to get to work early and work late, and the school district has stepped in to provide this coverage. Also, by pushing the start times earlier and changing transportation* the district saved about $400K/ year - which is a lot for our district. * What the district really did was reduce the number of bus drivers to the minimum needed, as they couldn't actually afford them or find enough people willing to take on a part-time job with weird hours. This really meant more parents providing transportation before going to work, IE: the schedule became a chicken-egg problem.