Why aren’t Florida schools run from 11-5:30?

by philg

Happy First Day of Spring!

In Florida, though, it will feel more like what we in Maskachusetts call “summer”. This gives rise to the dumbest question you will hear all season…

Elementary school in Miami is 8:35 am to 3:05 pm. Given that school buildings are air-conditioned, why not run the schools from 11-5:30 so that the kids can do outdoor stuff during the comparatively cool morning?

Instead of children running around on a soccer field during the hottest time of day, they could be enjoying sports during the most comfortable time of day and enjoying taxpayer-funded A/C during the hottest hours.

Obviously this is a bad idea, but why?

An iPhone snapshot from the Cirrus SR20, flying up the Miami Beach shoreline in January 2021. This proves my hedge fund manager friend’s adage regarding how it is impossible to lose money on a real estate investment: “They’re not making any more condos.”

10 thoughts on “Why aren’t Florida schools run from 11-5:30?”

  1. More convenient for most parents? Drop off, go to work? Kids are pretty durable! Real estate pricing is complex. In big recessions, banks were being killed by underwater & non-performing loans & hard to value properties. My college roommate set out to see if he could fix that and started a company that developed a market index now used for (among other things) reinsuring banks against their losses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case%E2%80%93Shiller_index

    • Paul: The current school day doesn’t correspond with a pre-coronapanic 9-5 work day. Parents who did work 9-5 would need to park children in an after-school program. Why is 11-5:30 worse in this response? Parents who work standard hours can park children in a pre-school program.

    • A lot of parents would duck out of work early, easier than coming in late. which my boss always hated (so I would usually be in and have the first pot of coffee ready by the time anyone else got there!). You have 1/2 of a good business plan (the idea)… Pitch it to the governors; they all need distractions. Take it national too: “Day too complex with the kids? Take advantage of our Coronational pre/post school programs.” [or: how to “Phil up your day?” ;]

  2. Very nice picture, I believe that’s the Newport Pier at 163 St. & A1A, Sunny Isles Beach. My first property was one of the low-rise townhomes toward the left center of the shot, in a neighborhood called Eastern Shores, but that was thirty years ago.

  3. Calif* does that & it’s a traffic nightmare to have school coincide with commuting hours. Those school trips don’t get folded into the parent’s commuting routes. The schools are in suburbs & the jobs are in cities 50 miles away. Just make generation Z read Real World Divorce so they don’t have any kids.

  4. Not that it’s a bad idea per se, but if school started at 11, then children would sleep until 10. Now some people argue that children should be doing that anyway, but they won’t use the extra morning time efficiently unless their coaches make them, a la figure skating.

  5. Whatever the mechanism, dare I say gimmick, for encouraging sport and play in young and old, it is a worthy objective.

  6. This would work, when and if schools become a 365 days schedule which is how to used to be centuries ago. At an early age, you gave your child away to learn a trade. After few years, they came back with a skill. If you didn’t give them away, you spent 365 days a year teaching them the trade of the family. Thus, “school” was a 24 hours and 365 days ordeal.

Comments are closed.