Lots of the United States is quite rural, so a bus service would never be able to pick up all of those kids. Only school buses can since the school bus routes are specifically designed to pick the kids up where they are.
If they don’t have a regular bus system that works then that’s what they need to start working on first. I’m convinced that it can be made to work if they are solution oriented instead of only looking for reasons why it won’t work and stopping there.
Where I live, buses have dynamic routes. You go on an app to book a journey, then you get a time and place to be where the bus will pick you up (plus a drop-off point). It works for school kids as well as anyone else.
Being solution-based still isn’t going to help kids who live miles from the nearest bus stop catch a regular bus. A complete reorganization of our towns and cities to have bus access for anyone might be nice, but then there’s the parents who really wouldn’t want their kids going on a public bus.
Hiring takes time. It also required a lot more money than was budgeted because you need people who don’t have a 9-5. And lastly, not everyone lives in the city where there are buses.
Unfortunately I have to live in the real world where towns aren’t designed well. Besides, the average yard in my neighborhood is 3.5 acres so general purpose public transportation wouldn’t work either.
Change happens iteratively. The first step is to acknowledge the problem and adjust how future development is planned. Start with the town center and move outward from there. Giving up fixes nothing.
100% agree please don’t attribute this person’s comments with the urbanist movement.
Urbanists want cities & towns to be better places to live for everyone, we want to improve the finances of towns and people, we want to improve the health & quality of life of the average person. Urbanists do not hate anyone’s way of life or want to force them to live differently.
90% of north Americans live in towns or cities. And no you don’t need a large population to support public transportation, here are hundreds of examples in Europe.
Except it’s too late for that. The cities are already built. Fixing it would require tearing down entire cities and building new ones. Sure, you could do it one chunk of the city at a time, but doing just one city would take decades and exorbitant amounts of money.
The Netherlands did it in the 70s and plenty of cities are progressively doing it. All you’re saying is, “we fucked our cities up, guess the only way forward is to double down.”
A small town is 10,000-50,000 people. Average home price is $300k. There are around 2,000 towns of 10,000-50,000. That’s $18,000,000,000,000 to build some of the small towns in the US to be public transportation friendly. Who gets dragged out of their homes to make room for rebuilding?
And you’ll still have to problem that many people don’t want to live in crowded towns. Most people that like crowded cities are already living there.
Also a tertiary function of schools is to act publically funded daycare. Moving the handoff later in the morning means that parents would also need to start work later, or take on fewer hours.
Not saying that wouldn’t be a good thing, but there are knock-on effects that go beyond the clout of a school to tackle.
Middle and high schoolers sure, but elementary schoolers, especially kindergarten and first grade? I know plenty of parents who wouldn’t let their kid walk down the street to school at that age.
Still, if there’s one thing America sucks at, it’s having people do healthy things. I’m very grateful I WFH, for now, and don’t have to wake up until 10AM.
I’ll have to take your word on it. Maybe I’ll bring it up next time a canvasser comes around, if I think of it. So many causes to keep track of these days… 😞
We lived in a city where high schoolers take public transit and that worked well for them, but the district could never hire enough drivers for the elementary and middle schools. Even with the drivers they had, they had to stagger school start and end times so that buses could do multiple routes. Some schools started at 7 and others at 9. Then the problem you highlight comes up, that there are only a few hours between shifts, so it was harder for drivers to have a second job. Many drove Uber between.
In terms of what time they go to bed? I might be missing something here but what I meant was that they’d just go to bed since school doesn’t start that early, so they’d lack sleep again anyways.
The idea is that teenagers find it really hard to go to bed early. But school still starts very early. So they end up sleeping less than they should to function. The anti biology stance of “they should go to bed earlier” is not helpful. What’s helpful is starting school later, let them have their vigil time into later hours, then they can sleep and recover fully, and do better at school. Thus potentially creating better educated adults.
See there’s your problem. We can’t have all these better educated adults in a functioning society. They’ll become all liberal and ruin our perfectly established capitalism with their cries for a living wage or whatever peasants call for these days.
I had a whole semester where classes where all in the morning (there was no choice until I had failed on the following years) and that whole semester I didn’t go to any classes. Great times sleeping.
Um no, because teens are naturally on a later schedule with their circadian rhythm. They are natural night owls. Their circadian rhythm signals their body to go to sleep later than children or adults. Read into it, this is well researched.
Something everyone here seems to be forgetting is that even if you are getting the same amount of sleep, sleeping at a time which fits your biological clock better is better for you. I can get some amount of sleep and wake up at 5am and be tired the whole day, and yet if I wake up at 8-9am with the same amount of sleep I am perfectly functional the whole day.
I noticed exactly this since starting WFH. Even if I suffer a bout of insomnia – where I get maybe 3 hours of sleep – just being able to sleep in to 0800 makes it so much more tolerable.
It goes from feeling tormented to just feeling rough around the edges.
God but I remember fighting to keep my eyes open at school and at work back then.
i still have to fight back sleeping anytime i am in a meeting. i actually started hallucinating once. doesnt even matter how much sleep i actually got or if its at the right time, i just automatically get tired sitting down listening to people talk
Man. I can handle 30 min pretty easy. After that I have to stand up at the back of the room cause otherwise I’d be nodding off so hard I would hurt my neck.
I mean this kindly: have you had a sleep study recently? That doesn’t sound typical and you may have a sleep disorder like sleep apnea. Diagnosis and treatment could give you more energy during the day. Take care!
Circadian rhythms are rooted in our very cells and dominate our lives. Defying them always comes at a penalty. Adding to the complexity here is that everyone is different; social norms be damned.
Jetlag is probably the best studied phenomenon for trying to “break the rules”, and surprise, there is no remedy other than waiting a few days to acclimate to a different solar cycle.
What if (hear me out) the high school kids can go to bed earlier if they’re sleep deprived? Waking up at a certain time is really only half the equation. The school isn’t making you stay up and get up early.
Going to bed earlier isn’t an effective solution for many kids. Around 1 in 6 adolescents find it difficult to fall asleep before 11:00 PM.
In adolescence, up to 16% of teenagers experience a sleep phase delay. Due to this circadian shift , their melatonin levels don’t begin to rise until later in the evening. As a result, they naturally feel more alert at night, making it harder for them to fall asleep before 11:00 p.m.
Well considering that public schools (at least in the US) are glorified daycares in place so both parents can go work, the obvious solution is to globally push back the concept of “morning” to mean ‘a few hours after the sun rises’.
They should have thought of that before becoming parents, then. It’s not the kid’s fault the parents can’t think ahead or take responsibility for their stupid actions. School shouldn’t be a babysitter for John and Jane Doe.
Schools act also as daycare, not their primary function but that’s the norm all over the world not sure why you think they shouldn’t or why this implies a lack of responsibility
The tragic truth when I’ve worked at schools that start that early is that it was done so that the kids could work/take care of siblings. Even then many kids would leave school early because they would be asked to come into work. It sucked, I had kids that would sleep through my classes because they had worked extremely late.
Most of the shitty things Public schools do are because we have no money, are trying to feed/clothes/protect kids who have literally no one else. The school I worked at had 100% free breakfast and lunch, because the population was so transient/not in the country legally that it wasn’t realistic to expect them to fill out the forms to get free lunch.
The system is such a brutal grind that is also designed to extract as much as possible from optimistic, well meaning folks. There is no money, so most good things come from teachers spending their own money, staying well after contract hours, etc, etc. The burnout rate is insane, my school has already had multiple people leave mid year (and this has happened every where I’ve worked). Alcoholism is rampant among teachers. The stress caused me to develop epilepsy - and I’m not the only person I know this has happened to.
Republicans have been running a war on education for years now, and this is the result. We are forced to do things that we know are bad and ineffective (like the shitty hours, or allowing physically violent students to stay in classroom because we aren’t allowed to suspend them, or teaching to the test) because we have no resources and are expected to be the entire social safety net.
Scientists: humans have evolved to go to sleep later in the evening and wake up later in the morning during their teenage years. It’s hard to fall asleep earlier and even if they do the quality of their sleep will be less.
Morons commenting on this post: just go to sleep earlier
is this an americabrained comment? here in sweden, and this is not some urbanist paradise, kids can absolutely get to school on their own, whether that be walking biking or taking public transport.
it’s in fact bog standard for kids to take the bus to school in my town, to the point that you really want to avoid their travel times because buses will be jam packed with annoying children.
In some states it’s illegal to leave children of a certain age unsupervised. I think it’s 11 and below here? People do it anyway and no one’s looking to prosecute, but it’s a thing.
I can’t speak for every municipality in America, but the elementary schools around here do not allow kids to walk or bike to school. Either that, or every single parent, no exceptions, disallows it, because I’ve never seen a child that young coming into or leaving the school on their own. FFS, when I used to pick up my stepson, same car every day, the teacher had to put their hand on the roof and look me in the eye through a rolled-down window. That was literally the rule.
So like I said, “some of the younger ones aren’t mature enough or raised independently enough”. It sucks, but it’s true.
I have an 8 and 10-yo. They love my house because I allow them freedom. We went to a huge camping place to get married this weekend, local outfitter sort of thing. I gave them some instructions and warnings, cut them loose. Their helicopter mom would shit her pants if she knew they walked all over the woods alone.
(And of course we got the usual comment below crying about capitalism. I’m not sure if these people expect that no one works for a living, or they don’t do it on a coordinated schedule, or what.)
I seriously do not understand going the fuck to bed earlier. Just go to bed earlier. Your body adapts over time. Sure schools could move the start time, but if not, just start the sleep sooner.
Working off of memory so take this with a good amount of salt. If I recall correctly, studies have found that teenagers generally don’t go to bed later to match if school starts later, but the same applies the other way too. It may be that they technically could get that sleep by going to bed earlier, but as a society that is not a viable proposal to fix the problems that arise from their lack of sleep.
Also just to make sure I’m not misunderstood, I don’t dispute that individuals can get used to a new sleep schedule or will go to bed earlier if they have to get up earlier, just that it isn’t as easy as waking two hours earlier, means go to sleep two hours earlier for teenagers especially.
I dont see what the issue is, the kids have plenty of time to sleep, if they go to bed at 9 they can wake up at 6 with 8 hours of sleep and one hour to spare.
The point is that we now know this to be true. Rather than try to shoehorn our biological needs in whatever spare pockets of time we can scrounge, we should focus on better adapting our society and it’s systems to our needs at all stages of life.
there is no time period which teenagers are more able to fall asleep
This is unequivocally false. That’s literally a part of the circadian cycle. We can more easily fall asleep at particular spans of our 24 hour cycle. These spans shift depending on our age.
This is actually a good question that people may not read into very well, and the OP probably knows but didn’t indicate: Humans have a circidian rhthym which is a component that indicates when you naturally want to wake up and sleep. Thoughout our lives it changes at different points, but the important point is that for teenagers, they want to be up at night and also wake up later(almost the exact opposite of elderly people).
So trying to make students sleep at 10pm is very difficult vs having school start later to allow classes to better match their sleep cycle.
From an evolutionary point of view, I wonder if it has to do with giving them plenty of evening time for sexual activities. Especially since 30 used to be old age at one point in our past, so teenage years were the childbearing years…
Luckily, my state understood this and our school hours were like 8-8:30am to 3pm. Still kinda early, but way less of a kick in the teeth as states that make their kids come in at 7am and out at 2pm.
Tbf it’s not gonna fix anything, teens need a LOT of sleep and their rhythm stray to as far as 4-5AM, so even when starting at 9 they won’t get a lot of sleep
What in my opinion would work is reducing school times a bit and have morning and evening batches with different staffs and the student could choose which time they want to attend, the productivity would be much higher making the lower time period not a problem, tho i am pretty sure there might be some issues in this system remembers CGP grey’s rule
one solution would be longer school years (doesn't have to be a 'year-round' calendar) with maybe an hour or hour-and-a-half less class time per day. but that costs more in terms of food service, transportation, building upkeep, and so forth; plus extra child care burden on parents when most families don't have a 'stay at home' parent these days.
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