The press commentary on permanent daylight saving time (DST) in the US is really confusing the point and misleading people when they need to be ready to advocate for themselves and not expect whatever happens in Congress to be the end of the story. So, here’s the deal (from a safety and health perspective):
– Having nearly the entire country of 340 million people suddenly change schedules by a whole hour causes more accidents as people lose sleep (Spring) or stay out late anticipating getting more sleep (Fall) or have to go out or return home in darkness when that had not been true the day before. Stopping this change would be an improvement.
– There’s nothing that forces us to start work or school at 8:30am or 7:47am or any other time. That is a decision entirely under control of each school board or workplace management team. Also, that time does not have to be consistent throughout the entire year. It could change depending on season as many businesses already do in the summer. We could start work at 9:00am in the winter and 8:00am during the rest of the year for instance, if that makes sense for our community.
– There are health benefits to having work or school start at a certain time relative to when the sun rises. What time the sun rises depends on the season, how far north or south you are, and your relative east-west position in your time zone. There is an “ideal” time to wake up for most people related to the time of dawn/sun rise, not some arbitrary number on the clock. This is true for both adults and children, and for children this time varies with age. DST fixes this for some locations and disrupts it for others.
So, what should we do? Get the data on when the sun rises and sets in your location throughout the year. Discuss school start times with your school board or work management: ideally 1-2 hours after sunrise for elementary school students, for example. See when the chosen start time goes outside the ideal range and then consider adjusting the time for those weeks or months. For communities in the southern US, no adjustments may be needed, but those in northern states may want to set a winter schedule to optimize safety and learning.
Some places would still be changing time then? Yes, but only those where the safety and health benefits of the change outweigh the harms and disruption of the change. Some may not change at all, and others only change their start times by 30 min.
And, by the way, if we keep the biannual DST adjustment, we can still do this. If a community doesn’t need the 1-hour DST clock adjustment, they can change their start times to counteract that time change and maintain their start time relative to sunrise. Back when we started this, we didn’t know what we know now about the science of circadian rhythms, learning potential, accidents, and health impacts. We do now, and we need to take it into account to make work and school as beneficial as possible including optimizing how we set start times.