<p>Sports is a big reason…and schools with sports have to jive their schedule with their opponents’ school schedules. It’s one reason why the year-round system where I lived did NOT put the HS’s on year round…they stayed traditional. that also created a headache for parents who had a HS kid and a K-8 kid. </p>
<p>Personally, I wish the nation’s schools would get on some kind of more uniform calendar and schedule. Where I live now, K-12 school starts the first week in Aug…Ugh. My relatives always schedule the big family reunions at that time because it meshes well with the rest of the country’s schedule…so my kids would end up missing a few days of school or we’d miss the FR. </p>
<p>It’s crazy…my kids would be done with school in May, while their Calif cousins wouldn’t be done til 3rd week of June.</p>
<p>For most school districts, it is the bus situation that determines the bell schedule. I’ve worked in an affluent school system with the transportation department. It was fascinating to see how they managed the bus schedule for 128 schools - it wasn’t a simple “oh sure, we can just switch the start times of these schools”. And woe to the planners if a bus gets to ONE person over capacity for a particular route (this was back in the days before computerized maps with network capability). </p>
<p>If the district is wealthy enough, more buses (and drivers and mechanics and larger storage/parking area) can be added but I have a feeling this isn’t viable in many places.</p>
<p>There is talk of moving high schools to a later schedule but planners don’t want the elementary school children to be walking in the dark, so elementary schools need to start relatively late.</p>
<p>Well, I’d say that schools function on the same hours as other businesses/organizations in the community. Most places open 8-9ish, so do schools. (We have a staggered start 7:45 ms, 7:55hs, 8:30 elem–reason for this is busing). </p>
<p>Schools end about the time that shift workers finish (3-3:30 ish), leaving time for activities, jobs, homework, family time in the evening.</p>
<p>Schools are major employers of people who aren’t teens (teachers, admin staff, custodians, food service workers, etc.) These people do not function best on an afternoon/evening schedule. And presumably, most will be in the profession longer than the four years a teen will be in high school. Their needs must be considered as well (and not just their alertness/sleep–things like daycare, younger children in the house who would like parent time in the evening)</p>
<p>Parents do not run on the teen schedule. Kill. Me. Now. School starts at noon, ends at 7 then extracurriculars, concerts after that. Dude, I’m in bed by 10 because my business opens at 8 and is likely to keep demanding I come to work at 8. There’s nothing wrong with a whole family being on a similar schedule. </p>
<p>Back in the farm era, teens got up early for chores because animals needed feeding and mucking. They didn’t seem to suffer many ill effects. Getting up early for school now isn’t going to harm them, either.</p>
<p>Way back in the late 1970’s our school system had a “growth” spurt. I grew up in a small town in Michigan. The school system couldn’t afford to build any new buildings so we had “split sessions”. The younger kids in the morning and the high school kids in the afternoon.
So I went to high school from 12:30 pm to 6:30 pm. It was awesome! I got to sleep in and even watch part of the young and the restless before school started…:)</p>
<p>“I’m wondering if schools have considered this but are concerned that parents would be leaving for work before kids leave for school and there would be issues with that?”</p>
<p>I believe that is exactly the reason why our middle and high schools start late, around 9 am. Parents need to get the elementary kids off to school before leaving for work. The buses come around 7-7:30. Then the buses come back for the middle and high schoolers, around 8-8:30. I can’t see doing it the other way around–is a kindergartener expected to get themselves out the door on time and walk to a bus stop independently? The older kids get out around 4, which can be a problem for getting dark. If mine stay after school for an activity, it’s going to be dark when they get home. That does affect the amount of exercise they get. </p>
<p>Because of the late start time, many school activities for the older kids meet before school instead of after school. I suppose this reduces scheduling conflicts.</p>
<p>Major reason are the buses here. Yes, going to school at 6:20 AM (when I left my house) sucked, but honestly… you got used to it and everyone survived. </p>
<p>More or less, high schools have to have relatively uniform start/end times. Could you imagine trying to schedule sports against other schools if there were radically different start and end times?</p>
<p>Plus, this allow students to have part-time jobs. Many state laws prohibit minors from working after X time. If you push school later, you’re pushing part-time jobs against that hour limit.</p>
<p>In our town, the elementary, middle and high schools have slightly different hours. High school starts at 7:50 (plus there’s an “early bird” period that starts at 6:55), elementary at 8:10 and middle at 8:35. It’s brutal for freshmen, as they go from the latest starting time in 8th grade to the earliest in 9th. </p>
<p>I don’t think the bus schedule dictates the school schedule. If that were the case I’m sure they could flip the high school and middle school start times. I think the high school needs to be on the same basic schedule as other high schools because of after school sports. As it is, our middle school athletes struggle to make it to some of their after school contests on time because they start later than many middle schools in the area.</p>
<p>I’m sure my high school D would prefer starting at 9:30 instead of 7:50, but if she did, that would push the end of the school day to nearly 5 pm. That would cut down on part time job hours, sports practices and the like, and I suspect it would make it difficult to get teachers, who have home lives and responsibilities, to put in an additional 1.5 to 2 hours at the end of the day for sports and other extra-curriculars. Not to mention that for part of the year it’s DARK before 5 pm.</p>
<p>If it’s sufficiently urban and warm enough that people aren’t walking in the cold and aren’t coming from 6 miles away that can make sense, but for most places that’s not an option.</p>
<p>Our schools are the reverse of Mathyone’s but a bit earlier. Middle and high schools start at 7:05 and elementary is around 8:30. I hate it and wish it were reversed. When the kids were in elementary it would have been more convenient to have them starting earlier. And we’d all like it if the teens could sleep later of course.</p>
<p>MichiganGeorgia - the high school I went to had a split schedule like that 2 years before I started. The morning kids HATED it. However, I did grow up in a rural area where plenty of kids were up at 5am to take care of farm duties, so lots of morning folks. </p>
<p>More high schools seem to be adding lights to fields around here. </p>
<p>(I’m a morning person, so I’m okay with getting things done first thing in the morning)</p>
<p>@Irishmom2- For us I think the ones who really didn’t like were parents like mine who had kids going in both the morning and afternoon. The school put the high school in the afternoon so that the farm kids could get all their work done before school although there were times the guys would drive the tractors into town to the grain elevator and then drive to school on the tractor. I’m not sure if that still happens.</p>
<p>Mom2CK, we don’t have a zero hour. And my kids are traveling to a school out of district, but the kids near us have to leave early, too, as our home district is on a 4 day school week, so they start earlier and stay later. The local kids who are on a bus leave especially early. We’re a rural district and some of the bus routes are really long. </p>
<p>Our kids deal with it, and have never even considered there might be another way. Granted, I’m no expert, and this isn’t a battle I’d like to fight in my area. But the articles I’ve seen point to fewer discipline problems, better grades and test scores (some schools, not all), and less drowsy driving. If our area switched the later start time for elementary school with the early high school start time, it would fit the kids’ sleep patterns better. But then we would bump up against sports practice, and we have a very active and local group of boosters. (Not so much for academics - that’s why we’re going out of district)</p>
<p>I attended an overcrowded HS with split times. I was so jealous of the kids who went to school in the afternoon. Mornings did not suit my night-owl nature!</p>
<p>We didn’t have a zero hour and it wouldn’t have worked with the buses. If you wanted a zero hour, you’d have had to have a parent drive you (if you were freshman or sophomore) or drive yourself (junior or senior). </p>
<p>Our district is way, way, WAY too big to have the buses go twice (once for zero hour and once for regular).</p>
<p>In MI, we have a law that public K-12 schools cannot start before Labor Day. LOVE the law- absolutely love it. It’s the way it should be IMO. I think we got out early-mid June.</p>
<p>We used to start the day after Labor Day every year. But now they go back mid-August. We’ve had some bad winters here in the last 10 years and a lot of districts started opening early to leave time to make up snow days in the spring. If there are no snow days, they get out mid-May. That’s not going to happen this year, though, since they’ve missed most of this week due to snow, cold and a chemical spill which contaminated to local water supply - no end in sight for that, either.</p>
<p>In MI, we have a law that public K-12 schools cannot start before Labor Day. LOVE the law- absolutely love it. It’s the way it should be IMO. I think we got out early-mid June.</p>
<p>I would like the whole nation, K thru college, to be on that schedule (or close to it). :)</p>
<p>That said, I think my kids’ schedule had an advantage for AP exams. They started classes the first week in August, then once APs were taken in May, they just had one more week and then done. </p>
<p>However, for their Calif cousins, they started HS around Labor Day, would take AP classes at the same time and then have another month of school. Weird. </p>
<p>If the whole nation was on the same/similar schedule, then the AP’s could be taken at the end or May or beginning of June.</p>
<p>@mom, we finish early-mid june and it’s an idiotic system for the high schoolers. The whole last month of school after the APs is a joke. They even have this crazy thing where they graduate the seniors before school ends! In order to do that, they give the seniors their exams while classes are still ongoing. Then the seniors can skip school, but the rest still have to attend, and take their exams two weeks later. Try teaching anything under those circumstances. That’s what a wast of time those weeks are, and yet we have to pay for it all to happen-- a fortune if you add up all the costs, for kids to just waste time or maybe be sat down in front of a movie.</p>
<p>M2ck, perhaps, but I personally liked the few weeks post-AP exams. In AP Spanish, they did cultural projects (art, music, plays, etc), Calc worked on preparing for the next stage of Calc, AP English did our huge term paper, etc. I wouldn’t have liked to do these things while doing AP exam studying. </p>
<p>Each way has pros and cons.</p>
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<p>That’s a failure of the teachers/school, not the schedule.</p>
<p>@romani, that sounds great, but that is not what happens in our school. I dearly wish they would write a term paper in English. They never do. It’s just wasted time.</p>
<p>Our AP classes all have summer homework because of the “start after Labor Day” law. They have to get all the material in over a fewer number of weeks so they do around 4 chapters of material at home over the summer and start with an exam on that material the first week of school. It would be nice if they had as much as time as the schools that start in early August. The year my daughter took APUSH, one of the essay questions on the AP test was about the Vietnam War. They hadn’t gotten to it. They only got to the Korean War. Needless to say, she didn’t do well on that AP test!</p>