while I understand the situation, I wouldn't apply it to every school district equally. But that, to me, sounds like a reasonable argument for delaying the start time and ending the day a bit later. I am mostly thinking of schools like Hampshire Regional, which have 5 towns that flow into one school and they are definitely far apart. I think there might be a compromise that could be had about minimizing bus travel time for school kids (or better yet, get some friggin train system out there that might be a good way to help speed up the transit! think about it: public train systems for bringing kids to school :D). That might be redirecting towns to larger/closer places (e.g. instead of Southampton kids being brought to Hampshire Regional in Westhampton, send them to Westfield or Northampton, whichever is closer, and set up the regional high school in Chesterfield). Although the reality is that when everyone is so spaced out, the minimum travel distance is going to hurt somebody somewhere. But the current school systems are mostly local towns just saying "hey, let's merge together!" without real thought about what the best regional merges would be. Just what local towns feel like at some point in time.

That being said, eastern mass has some of this too (sadly). The METCO program requires most of the kids being taken from Boston to the outer suburbs to get a 5:30am start, which was terrible for those kids. I honestly felt bad because they were definitely trying to stay awake, but just couldn't some days.