Staff Reports
On Wednesday, Ron DeSantis signed off on rolling back a new law requiring later middle and high school start times and conceded it’s best to let local school officials decide what time school should start.
SB 296 will repeal a 2023 law requiring middle schools to start no earlier than 8 a.m. and high schools not before 8:30 a.m.
Both the Senate and House passed this Session’s bill to cure the two-year-old measure.
The new law would not have taken effect until 2026, but local school officials warned the change was creating logistical nightmares for larger school districts and some rural ones.
Elementary school students could be waiting outside even earlier in the dark for their buses. School districts, already facing a bus driver shortage, would have needed to hire even more drivers. Working parents also weren’t pleased with the new schedule. It also could have caused scheduling challenges for teenagers who dual-enroll at local colleges.
Under SB 296, the mandated later start times will not be enforced, but lawmakers want school districts to report on considerations for deciding school start times.
School districts will be required to report on start times, the community engagement process, and the financial impacts of delayed start times. Once the district submits that document in writing, it is considered in compliance with the 2023 law, no matter when school begins.
According to Senate staff analysis, the average Florida high school starts at 7:45 a.m..
“Forty-six percent of high schools start before 7:30 a.m., and 19% of high schools start between 7:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.,” the analysis said. “For Florida middle schools, the average start time is 9:03 a.m., with only eight percent of schools starting prior to 8:00 a.m.”
Even the original sponsor of the 2023 bill was in favor of overturning it.
“Without more resources, without maybe even more time to figure out how we actually implement this in real time, with bus driver shortages and the like, we are possibly walking into a minefield that we shouldn’t venture into,” said Sen. Danny Burgess, a Zephyrhills Republican, during last month’s Committee debate. “It was one heck of a pain in the butt that bill was. And so this makes me wonder what it was really all for.”
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A.G. Gancarski and Gabrielle Russon contributed reporting.
2 comments
LexT
May 22, 2025 at 8:28 am
No one wants schools starting super early in the morning, but it does create some real issues that can’t magically be waived away. We have three tiers of public school (elementary, middle and high school). Starting at the same time impacts the number of buses and drivers needed greatly. Each tier also traditionally as a larger and larger population so it needs to bus students from farther and farther out. Being efficient with this process is hard. We also are trying to time it where parents can drop off their youngest children on their way to work. Unless you have a global solution, all that original bill did was identify a problem with no identification of a potential solution. It created an unfunded mandate to local school boards.
Larry Gillis, Director-at-Large, Libertarian Party of Florida
May 22, 2025 at 3:28 pm
LIBERTARIANS WANT LOCAL GOVERNMENT, MAYBE:
The Libertarian Party of Florida prefers local government, but only to the extent that Government is actually THE solution. More specifically, our state platform says, in pertinent part:
” … VI. Paying for Government … 5. Localism … In support of Localism, we prefer home rule as it is the most local jurisdiction of government, over ones more removed in State or Federal, as these entities largely consist of legislators from other jurisdictions. …”
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