Getting the kids to adapt sucks, but my kids are considerably more cogent when they wake up and it's not pitch black out. I don't see next school year going well if the sun won't come up until well after they've started school.
I notice the same. When does school start for your kids? For my kids it starts at 8:15 and that's enough for it to be bright out in the winter in standard time. I guess I haven't really thought about the fact that it might be dark out for most of the morning in daylight saving time in the winter.
We live in SoCal, which mitigates the problem somewhat.
It used to be that school start time went by the age of the student. So, high school kids started first, elementary school kids started last. Based on studies showing that isn't ideal, Massachusetts schools have started changing that around. So, grades 3 - 5 start earliest now at 7:30, which means getting up around ~6:30 to eat, dress, pack, etc. and get to the bus stop for a 7:10 pick-up. Standard time doesn't make it all sunny all morning, but it gradually rises as we're getting ready. It's really dismal when DST is still in effect. I think geographically, the northeast US should be in the Atlantic timezone, too, so that doesn't really help matters.
I never understood why Michigan was on Eastern time. It’s literally called “the Midwest” and yet they’re on the same time zone as NYC. Little fun fact: Michigan actually has two time zones; the westernmost portion of the upper peninsula is in the central time zone.
I really wish we’d end these shenanigans and just operate everything in UTC. How many human lifetimes have been wasted writing code to handle timezones and conversions? We live in a global economy, it’s time to start thinking like one.
My highschool started at 7:0something. It was dark when we started and we didn’t have much light after either in the winter. They made all sorts of claims about how this was somehow helping prepare us for “the real world”. I’ve worked in tech since my early 20s and these days I wake up around 8am, but when we were going into the office for the past decade I’d almost never get in before 10am, and all of us in software jobs in Silicon Valley get paid more than those making the decisions at the school districts. It’s sad how out of touch they were and continue to be.