Start School Later to Stop After School Juvenile Crime

What are our kids doing between 2:10 and 6:00ish when parents get home?  Hopefully, most are doing homework, participating after school activities, watching younger siblings, or just hanging out with friends.  Unfortunately, many are not doing things we would want them to be doing.  Who came up with the idea that all our children should go to school early and then raise themselves for 15 to 20 hours a week.  Does that even sound like a good idea??  Below is a quote and a link to one study in showing what we already know:

"A 2006 survey of over 600 California 12 to 17 year olds found that kids left unsupervised three or more days per week are twice as likely as other kids to hang out with gang members, three times as likely to be engaged in criminal behavior, and three times as likely to smoke marijuana." Opinion Research Corporation. (2006, May). FIGHT CRIME : INVEST IN KIDS California , California Survey of Teens.

http://www.up2us.org/uploads/reports/Outside%20Resources/Afterschool%20p...

This just makes no sense.  Our children are still children at ages 16 and 17.  We need to be responsible for them.  We also need to pay for them which is why most families include two working parents.  Schools need to be responsive to this need and start later, letting our kids out of school later.  Kids raising themselves are often nothing but trouble. 

Start High School at 9:00am!   Give parents a fighting chance at supervising their kids!!

Sign our petition for the Howard County Board of Education to Start School Later at: http://signon.org/sign/changing-howard-county

We already have over 1,200 signatures!  Go Howard!!

Yours in Service,
Mark Donovan