If you look at a schedule of sunrise and sunset, there is no reasonable hour for school kids to walk in the daylight year-round. So your choice is to either let them walk in the dark in winter; not let them walk at all; change school hours seasonally; or change all hours seasonally.
It’s not clear that daylight savings is the least reasonable solution. And there is no fundamental reason to me that the time has to be the same in two different states. Wanting to live with the hobgoblin of consistency does not make your plan correct.
I don't understand what you're trying to say.
The northernmost tip of the continental US gets about 8 hours of daylight during winter solstice. School is normally about 6.5 hours, so it's possible to give kids at least 45 minutes of daylight on either end of school any day of the year. Obviously not possible in Alaska, but possible in the other 49.
If you insist on your time zones being an hour wide, that makes it 15/75 and 75/15 on the edges. 15 minutes isn't a lot of time to walk to/from school, but that's only the week of winter solstice which is often during Christmas break anyways. Every week away from solstice adds about 15 minutes.
Okay, you do understand what I’m trying to say, so what am I supposed to respond? Tell me what your calculations for the school day year-round would best be in Washington State, and Maine.
The existing standard times already work? For Seattle on PST that puts sunrise at 7:54AM and sunset at 4:20PM in Seattle during winter solstice. Which gives almost an hour of sunlight on either side for a standard school day of 9-3:30.
For Bangor on it's 7:06AM and 4:03PM. It'd work better for an 8:30-3:00 school schedule. But for a 9-3:30 they'd unsurprisingly be better off on Atlantic Standard Time.
Now convince the parents that the kids should go to school at 9 and convince the companies that parents should start work at 10. I’m not really the one you need to bat around.
School start time is already 8:50AM in Seattle, no convincing needed.
They start earlier in Bangor, but the sun rises earlier in Bangor, so again everything already lines up quite well.
My kid’s elementary school in Seattle starts at 7:50 AM
Yeah, you can't have kids walking in daylight during the winter solstice unless all schools start at the same time. You can pick a time zone to match the school start time, or you can pick a school start time to match the time zone. But any school more that 30 minutes different has kids walking in the dark during the winter solstice.
As a 90s kid, reading this caused me to wonder "How many kids actually walk to school anymore? I've almost never seen it in the US." Seems like it might be around 10%:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...