>>Elementary school here is 7:30am-2:30pm with a 25 minute lunch. For highschool, it is 8:30am-3:30pm with a 30 minute lunch. Sometimes the start and end times are off by 15 minutes or so (in Greensboro my daughter's school was 8:40am-3:40pm), but I've never heard of school started any later than 8:40am or lunch any longer than 30 minutes (don't want the kids to be wandering around getting into trouble) That's in all my years of school (Wisconsin, Colorado, Oregon) and my daughters now.
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>Congrats for being in a place that recognizes that younger kids get up earlier. 7:30 is still too early, but at least it's the little ones, not the teens.
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>FWIW, my kids start at 8:50 in grade school and then progressively earlier. They had a combined lunch plus recess of 45 minutes through 6th grade. (The rule was you had to stay at lunch at least 15 minutes and no longer than 30. So you could have anywhere from 15-30 minutes outside.) In our middle school and high school, lunch was a regular period, so generally 45 minutes.

Our grammar school (all boys) ran from 9 - 4. Not so sure how long for lunch, but there used to be 2 sittings in the canteen - maybe that made the lunchtime longer, but it seemd to last for ages and we'd get a lot done socially. The girls' grammar, across the small town, finished at 4:45, to give them a chance of getting the buses before the melee of us lot.

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>When I was a kid (back in the dark ages <g>), school started (the late bell rang) at 9. We went home for lunch at 12 and had to be back by 1:30, then finished at 3:30. I always laugh when people talk about how the school day is shorter now.
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>OTOH, my junior high was on shifts. The morning shift (which was all the 7th grades and the 8th graders who were going to go to a high school for 9th grade) started at 7 and finished at noon.

Not much provision there for parents being at work

>Second shift ran noon to 5.

Now THAT'S rough

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>Tamar