[drewvolpe]

One of the changes was moving start times of high schoolers later, which often came at the expense of younger students who would've had to start earlier. In my neighborhood, having to put 5 year olds on the bus at 6am or earlier was a big cause for the uproar from parents.

Can you talk about how you made this tradeoff? There's research that suggests high schoolers do better with later start times. But is there any research that backs up doing it at the expense of younger students? ie, is it possible that all students benefit from a later start time?

[arkh]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222804/

> Research findings suggest that changes occur in the “biological clock” during adolescence. As a result, teenagers have a natural tendency to fall asleep later and to wake up later. This is referred to as sleep phase delay.

> A correlation was found between subjects' melatonin secretion and their stage of development. The results indicated that melatonin onset occurs later in adolescents, making it difficult for them to go to sleep earlier at night. At the same time, the hormone “turns off” later in the morning, making it harder for them to wake up early (Carskadon et al., 1998, 1999).

It's like things are happening to the body during puberty.

[lodrein]

I am no specialist of children health, but my understanding is the following: I guess starting too early is never good for any child, but there is something specific with teenagers that makes it a lot worse. There is much more medical literature documenting this fact than for the younger kids. So yes, in a way, given the constraints of costs, the algorithm had to choose the lesser of two evils.