My kids' school district (Newton) shifted the High School start time to 9:00 from 7:40 this year, a huge change. There do seem to be some benefits to starting later, but there are clear trade-offs.

It really messes with after-school activities, particularly sports because you have to coordinate with other schools. Our HS end time is now 3:45, so by the time kids can get on a bus to travel to an away game it's 4:00pm. By the time you arrive at another high school, game time may have to be 5:00pm. Now you have to worry about commuter traffic, sunset times, and pushing dinnertime to be quite late. Not to mention students at the other school have been out since 2:30pm or whatever and have to wait around for the Newton team to arrive a couple of hours later.

Sure, the sports team can leave school early. But if one outcome of a later start time is having athletes miss school, then that's not great.

Another issue: during the winter, it's starting to get dark while kids are going home from school. That's a safety issue, and it also just sucks to have zero daylight after school.

Glad you're both okay. Scary.

That's an insightful chart, but I say this as an economist who understands the difference between year-over-year and month-over-month rates of change, the concept of annualization, etc. A general audience would probably find this confusing without additional explanation.

When you say the year-over-year CPI change is "exactly 6.5 months out of date", are you saying that (for example) the December 2021 to December 2022 is really capturing the rate of change at the midpoint of that time period (mid-June)? Other than the reporting lags, I'm not sure what you're including in the concept of "out of date".