[ExBritNStuff]

The Elementary school comment rings so true. We have to get my seven year old up at 6:15 to get to school at 7:30. That's if we take him, if he caught the bus he would have to be AT the stop by 6:15. Every day is a battle against exhaustion. On the days that school is delayed due to weather and he can get up naturally at maybe 7:30, he is so much better. He feels better, his attitude is more positive, and he does so much better with learning.

[dahfizz]

Why does the school bus pick him up more than an hour before school starts? That seems ridiculous.

[rasputin243]

Sounds like my experience growing up in a rural area. My high school was on the other side of our county, so I was the first person on the bus every morning, 60 minute ride each way.

[war1025]

Kind of off topic, but a fun story: Growing up, we were the last kids off our bus and the ride took an hour. The silly thing was, there was a different bus that drove past our literally five minutes after school got out. Eventually they figured it out and switched the route we were on, but by then we were old enough to not ride the bus most of the time.

[jmckib]

For me it was often 90 minutes to get home, but about 30 minutes into the trip we would drive right by my house. Problem was, it was on the other side of the street, and they wouldn't let me cross. This was in middle school, on a street that I crossed by myself all the time.

[mrhappyunhappy]

While on subject of school buses, my driver would not let me cross the street on the way home, so even though I was the first stop, I’d have to wait until we looped all the way around to the end. My stepdad had to scream down their throats and they finally caved, I came home an hour earlier. Talk about the stupidity of that situation!

[jmckib]

Just realized I wrote basically the same comment as you. I wish my stepdad had yelled at them! It didn't even occur to me that I could complain.

[mrhappyunhappy]

Oh it didn’t occur to me right away either. This was in middle school and I was not the smartest cookie, so I must have wasted at least 5 trips before the revelation occurred.

[dljsjr]

Small town America. The high school I attended in 9th grade was a 30 minute drive away if there was no traffic and first bell was at 7:00 AM. It also served 2-3 small towns in the area. I took the bus before I could drive, and my bus stop was one of the first on the route that had to pick up kids from all over the place because we didn't have a lot of busses. So in order to get me to school on time for 7:00 AM, I got picked up at 5:45 AM.

[eecc]

Jeez... couldn’t they spend a couple bucks more for extra service?

Now that’s in essence the whole problem with tax cuts and privatizations: public service is cut to the bone, and privatized ones maximize their profits together with the citizenry’s inconvenience.

[Lordarminius]

For this and most questions regarding school schedules, consider the point that the timing is for the convenience of the adults who need to go l get to work / back home / other tasks, not the children. A school system that puts kids first would start by 9am but how would society cope with that ?

[AnthonyMouse]

> A school system that puts kids first would start by 9am but how would society cope with that ?

Do it like daylight savings time. Have everything start two hours later, all year. The issue for the kids is time related to sunrise, not time related to when the parents go to work.

[gardnr]

> The issue for the kids is time related to sunrise, not time related to when the parents go to work.

Is that what it is? I thought it was total sleep duration. Do you have a link explaining more?

[AnthonyMouse]

> I thought it was total sleep duration.

They're related. If you go to sleep at the same time (relative to actual-midnight) and get up an hour before school, you get more sleep when school starts later.

Or else what difference would any of it make? If all you did was start school at 9:30 instead of 7:30 and then kids used that to go to bed two hours later, nothing has changed. But when people go to sleep (and are inclined to wake up) has a lot to do with daylight.

[kd0amg]

If you go to sleep at the same time (relative to actual-midnight) and get up an hour before school, you get more sleep when school starts later.

That still doesn't seem all that helpful. If my high school had started at 10 instead of 8, I'd be out of class at 5:30 instead of 3:30, done with fencing practice at 8 instead of 6, etc. I'd finish the night's homework two hours later, and finishing that was already well past sundown even on the original schedule. A later start time wouldn't have been an opportunity to stay up later -- it would have been an obligation to stay up later.

[irrational]

Our middle schools start at 9:15am and society copes just fine.

[zelos]

8:45-9 is the standard school start time in the UK at least.

[BigChiefSmokem]

To pick up the other kids on a long route.

[AnthonyMouse]

> To pick up the other kids on a long route.

The obvious problem then being that the routes are too long.

You have to wonder if there isn't some kind of carpool incentive the school could give to parents to get rid of 90-100% of buses. How many stay at home parents with 9-passenger vehicles would be willing to make $500/month by filling their minivan with other kids when they deliver their own kid as they were going to do regardless?

Cheaper than buses, kids spend less time sitting in vehicles because there are 8 kids instead of 30, fewer vehicles (and especially fewer huge diesel buses) on the road because those parents were driving their kids anyway.

[topkai22]

I actually did the math on this in my district. Based on the cost data they published, it costs (roughly) $1.5-2/ride on our school bus system. Allowing 20 minutes for pick up and drop off, no current ride-sharing system I know about would be cost competitive, but its a relatively close thing.

RE carpooling, this probably cost competitive but their are other factors that make this harder than you think. Buses are allowed exemptions to booster seat rules, minivans aren't- do you leave the van full of car of booster seats all day? Do kids carry their own? My kindergartener still has issues buckling their self in in a crowded car, that really pushes up pickup/drop off time spent. How do you get kids to school if the primary driver is sick or has car trouble? Who is liable for accidents? Do you randomly drug/alcohol test your parents?

None of these are insolvable, but they also aren't easy.

School busing in the era of autonomous vehicles gets a lot more interesting- you could have much smaller and efficient pick up routes. However, I think it will take (US at least) society a while before they are willing to leave 4-8 children alone in a car for 30 minutes a day. It just takes a couple 5th graders fighting in a car before the district decides supervision is needed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Buses are allowed exemptions to booster seat rules, minivans aren't

Buses are allowed exemptions for pragmatic reasons, not safety reasons. Whatever the rule is, it should be the same for both, in which case there is no relative advantage. If you're not willing to allow it for a minivan, why are you willing to allow it for a bus? (This also doesn't apply to high school students who don't need them anyway.)

> How do you get kids to school if the primary driver is sick or has car trouble?

How do you do it when the school bus driver is? You maintain some level of reserve and you send someone else.

> Who is liable for accidents?

The insurance company. The better question is who pays for the insurance, but considering that the school would already be paying for it for a school bus, it still doesn't appear to be any disadvantage for the school either way.

> Do you randomly drug/alcohol test your parents?

They're voluntarily choosing to drive someone else's kids for money. If you want to do that and they don't, they don't get put on the roster and don't get paid. It seems like the only real question is whether (or how often) it's worth the cost given the expected probability of drug abuse in your parent population.

[Terretta]

> no relative advantage

Speed doesn’t kill, change in speed kills.

With significant mass at play, a bus in a collission doesn’t change speed as suddenly as a car, thus passengers experience less G force.

The rule does appear to relate to weight, and safety reasons:

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/01/why-the-schoo...

Notable quote:

> Federal agencies like the National Highway Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have long maintained that even without seat belts, school buses are the safest mode of transportation for children. Between 2005 and 2014, NHTSA reported 1,191 crashes involving school buses or other vehicles functioning as school buses. That makes up less than 1 percent of the 331,730 fatal collisions in those 10 years. Among the 133 people who die each year on average in related crashes, only 11 are bus passengers or drivers.

However, that doesn’t help when the bus collides with an immovable object, so the rules are being reconsidered.

[vkou]

> Buses are allowed exemptions for pragmatic reasons, not safety reasons.

No, buses are safer, period, even without seatbelts. Occupants of bigger vehicles have much better outcomes in auto collisions, and buses are some of the biggest vehicles on the road.

Also, most school buses don't do much freeway driving... Not having a seatbelt in 25 mph collision is one thing. Not having a seatbelt in a 70 mph collision is lethal.

[tstrimple]

All kinds of liability problems with that. School bus drivers are presumably vetted and trained to deal with not just getting from point A to point B, but dealing with students along the way.

[AnthonyMouse]

School bus driver "vetting" is checking their driving and criminal record and "training" is essentially how to operate a large vehicle. The first could still be done, the second doesn't apply.

And the liability issues all seem to go the other way, don't they? Buses are less safe (they don't even have seatbelts), problematic incidents involve a larger number of students, the buses are more officially associated with the schools, etc. And actual parents obviously have better incentives to make sure their kids are safe than someone who is only doing it for a paycheck.

[iambateman]

In 9th grade, my bus driver let an obviously angry man onto the bus.

Some kids threw peanuts out the window and into his car. He followed us to the next stop and pounded on the door. She courteously opened the door and in he came, shouting the whole way.

The awkwardness was compounded when I realized I had known this man for 10 years.

I don’t have a very high opinion of bus driver training.

[irrational]

Where I grew up the high school was a 45 minute drive away. We would get picked up an hour early so there was a little leeway in case of traffic.

[bg4]

Same, in Indiana. High school started at 7:45, bus picked up at 6:45.

[jazzyjackson]

more schools are consolidated these days. In some places, one large school serves 3 counties. I don't know why.

[Brockenstein]

It's more expensive to run three schools. And if those three schools don't each have enough students, they're going to be underfunded as funding is largely based on the number of students.

So the problem starts multiplying.

1. Can't afford supplies, facilities, etc.

2. Can't afford to be properly staffed.

3. The school is invariably going to be under-performing and we've decided as a society that if your school isn't performing well we're going to penalize it by cutting funding, which exacerbates the funding problem.

4. You've got all sorts of people, fiscal hawks, tax payers, etc who don't really want to pay for education, let alone pay for half empty schools and all that overheard. No one really wants to subsidize a ghost town...

So the result is school districts that are too small to make sense being combined together to try and pool their resources and maintain quality and efficiency.

So if you live out in super rural or low population density areas, and families aren't churning out children like they're old school farmers or Catholics, then this is the sort of reality you'll have to deal with.

[RikNieu]

Traffic? Traffic at that time of day can be crushing. Arounds here, anyway.