I really don't understand the pressure to start schools so early, it seems contrary to the goals of both children and parents.
A parent needs their kids to be supervised until they come home from work. Kids need to get sleep. Schools are presently time shifted between 2and 3 hours early relative to parental schedules.
My only question is why? School could start 3 hours later and kids would get out roughly at the time their parents are coming home from work.
Places where schools start early also may be places where work starts early. For example, I live in Calgary. My high school started at 8 and many kids got there at 7:30. Work in Calgary also starts at 8ish in my experience.
Toronto's public school board opens for 8:30 and classes start at 8:50. Work starts at 9 in Toronto.
This may be a Canadian thing. where I went to school in Connecticut, school began at 7:15 AM with the first busses arriving at 6:30 AM. A non trivial portion of students had to be out of the house by 5:30 AM to make the bus.
Work on the other hand started at 9-9:30AM. While I didn't experience this directly, my mother must have had the brutal schedule of being up at 5 AM and arriving home at 6 PM.
the supervision argument has always been strange to me because after school you have gaggles of unsupervised children who have maybe a 2-3 hour gap between the school day ending and their parents getting home. are kids dying in droves between 3 pm and 5:30?
A parent needs their kids to be supervised until they come home from work. Kids need to get sleep. Schools are presently time shifted between 2and 3 hours early relative to parental schedules.
My only question is why? School could start 3 hours later and kids would get out roughly at the time their parents are coming home from work.