That’s the reason against starting late. Parents want older siblings to be available to babysit after school and employers want a 16 year old’s shift to start at 14:30, not 16:30. Extracurricular activities (which should be supported, as long as the children themselves want to do them and as long as they’re not actively harmful to children) can often run 90-150 minutes with changing time and warmups, which makes a later start time logistically difficult for families with children of various ages who want to eat dinner together.

It’s a complicated issue and a solution which involves shorter school hours seems to me to be the best one, but that’s obviously even harder to implement without cutting things that are important, so I don’t know how to actually solve this problem.

I live in Germany now, which has tracking. This seems both hella classist and better for ensuring kids can get sufficient sleep. I would love to know if any country/school system has figured out how to do it in a way that doesn’t deprive some kids of future opportunities.

And limiting the number of busses on the road at the same time for those other parents stuck in rush hour traffic.