Thoughts on starting the school day later

I was reading the Straits Times the other day about the positive benefits about starting the school day later.  Basically, students would perform better academically. However, as bus operators who ferry students to schools also ferry worker to offices/factories, they pick up the students on the same schedule as before, Schools that have pushed back their start times find some students still arriving at the same time and these students have to endure a longer wait. The articles suggests pushing back the starting time even further back (to say 9am) so that bus operators have enough time to ferry workers and students. Parents would also have some time for breakfast with their kids. Anyway, I saw this letter to the ST forums:

Teachers and other staff will also benefit from later start to school day

MANY parents like me are in full agreement with the article, 'Start school later and let children sleep longer' (Jan 9).

Finally, after so many years, we have an article that puts this matter in perspective. How is it that our children's well-being is determined by bus operators keen to make more money by operating two services instead of one? Since Singapore has no natural resources and depends on labour to sustain the economy, do the authorities not want to evaluate the ramifications of sleep deprivation on our children in their growing years?

 

Apart from that, will teachers and other school staff not also benefit from this positive change? I am certain that teachers and staff will welcome the change as this means aligning their working hours to those of their spouses and other family members. With positive changes like this, the Ministry of Education will see less attrition of good teachers too.

 

Furthermore, if school starts later at 8.30am or 9am, schoolchildren will also depend less on school buses as working parents can take them to school on the way to work. It is ridiculous to allow children's and school staff's well-being to be decided by bus operators. It is time the authorities looked into this and not continue this mindless trend.

 

With sufficient rest, children will not find school as tiring and tedious and will enjoy it more. Teachers will also be less sleep-deprived and able to deal with work stress better too.

 

Ginny Leow (Mdm)

Some thoughts.

First, can we fault the bus operators for wanting to make more money by operating two services instead of one? Of course not, these are private business entities and they provide a solution to the problem of getting kids to schools. How much of a rise in transportation fees are parents willing to bear so that bus operators can maintain their current profits by running one service instead of two? And since labour is indeed needed to sustain the economy, it is important as well to ferry workers to their workplaces as well and it should not be denigrated.

Second, what are the ramifications for other motorists, public commuters and transport operators? And not all students take school buses, quite a lot of them make use of public transport as well and starting school later would definitely add a significant amount of traffic during the morning rush hours. Feeder and intra-town bus services would be most severely affected as many primary and secondary schools are located near to student's homes. They would be jam-packed with students at a time when hordes of people are rushing to work. Train passengers would be affected as well but would not be as much since student traffic is usually localised (at least for primary and secondary students).

To add on, if parents drive and need to drop their kids off, traffic around the school might slow down as well. If they don't, they'll need to take the public transport to send their kids to school. Either way we're looking at a situation where almost everyone spends more time in their daily commute and a certain proportion of them needs to wake up earlier. And the reason for this is so that students can spend more time sleeping. How ironic is that?

If school is to start later.....make it a lot later

Starting school later is a good idea, but clashing with the peak hour traffic is not. 9.30 or 10am would be a better  time to start school as the crowd would have thinned out by then