Local Control or Misplaced Priorities?

Understanding Florida's school start time fiasco

In May 2023 Florida’s legislature surprised the nation by passing a law setting a floor on how early its middle and high schools could start instruction. The bill had widespread bipartisan support and gave districts up to three years to comply.

In May 2025 Florida’s legislature was on the verge of repealing the law, rendering it almost powerless by allowing districts to opt out if they claimed compliance would be logistically or financially challenging.

Florida’s law was both inspired by and modeled on a virtually identical law passed by California in 2019, and implemented in 2022. The only difference was that legislators and advocates had to fight like crazy to get the California bill passed. In Florida everything sailed through smoothly, with barely any opposition.

Until there was nearly unanimous opposition.

So what went wrong?

California’s Groundbreaking Law

In fall 2019 California made history by becoming the first U.S. state to set a floor on how early secondary schools could require attendance. The law, which was introduced by Senator Anthony Portantino and co-sponsored by Start School Later at his request, prevented public high schools in the state from starting the official school day before 8:30 a.m., and public middle schools before 8 a.m.

Districts could set whatever specific schedules for their schools they desired, so long as these schedules respected these parameters.

Passing this law had taken multi-year, herculean efforts by a grassroots, volunteer network of parents, students, sleep researchers, health practitioners, and educators up against paid and powerful lobbyists—most notably, the highly influential and well-funded California Teachers Association (CTA). Together with the California School Boards Association, the CTA claimed that the bill, however well intentioned, impinged on local control. Governor Jerry Brown agreed. After two years of efforts by passionate volunteers on both local and national levels to educate lawmakers, elicit expert support, and provide in-person testimony, the bill finally passed, only to be vetoed by Brown.

After yet another year involving mobilizing volunteers, obtaining co-sponsorship by the California PTA, and various political compromises—as well as ugly paid advertisements by opponents—the bill passed again. We were biting our nails waiting for Governor Gavin Newsom to sign (or not sign) it before the 30-day deadline. The signature didn’t come until almost the stroke of midnight on the last allowable day, and when it did the groundbreaking law got international media coverage.

So it was no surprise that other states started looking at similar legislation. And they knew who to call—and who might oppose them—when they did.

The Easy Passage

In February 2023, shortly over a year after California’s bill became law, the Florida House Choice & Innovation Subcommittee devoted an entire afternoon to adolescent sleep and school start times. They brought in three national experts who had prominently advocated for the California law and reviewed a report already prepared by the legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability providing statistics about start times by district and school type, start times in other states, national trends, recent legislation in other states, and detailed information about 12 Florida districts that had already delayed or were considering delaying start times.

The supportive, non-combative tone in the room was surreal compared to the vitriol typical in public meetings on this topic. Committee members asked softball questions clearly intended to build support for change. They pulled quotes from materials and speeches from Start School Later advocates to assuage the weak objections and concerns that arose. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did.

The very next day an unseasoned legislator filed a bill virtually identical to California’s, similarly giving districts a three-year period to prepare. Unlike California—or any other state—this bill was passed handily by various committees and eventually the full legislature without any significant opposition. On May 12, 2023, only three months after its introduction, it was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis.

Today almost exactly two years later, a second bill that effectively neutralizes this law sits on DeSantis’s desk awaiting his signature. It has breezed through the legislature just as easily as the bill it is trying to undo.

Too Good to Be True

Florida’s process of getting a school start time law passed broke the mold. The many pieces typically required for successful policy change whether at the local or state level were nowhere to be found.

In California, for example, getting a law passed took a combination of sustained advocacy, a mobilizable base of constituents, a bill sponsor who was personally committed to the cause and had political capital to spare, strong and diverse support from major state and national organizations, and a fortuitious change of governor. At Start School Later we had spent years, arguably decades, building a network that made much of this possible and raising awareness about why the bill mattered. In Florida, though, it seemed to take nothing except a few months of saying the new law would be a good thing to do for kids. And almost everyone seemed to agree, oddly happy to follow the path of California, a state with nearly polar opposite politics at the time.

It was hard not to think that the whole thing was too good to be true—which, of course, it was.

As I ultimately learned, the explanation for this bill’s success lies in the perception by Republican Party leaders that the teachers union wouldn’t like it. Whether that perception was accurate (and it wasn’t necessarily—as many teachers and teacher unions, including the National Education Association, support later start times and even laws like this)—is beside the point. After Governor DeSantis heard about the issue from a Florida Start School Later advocate with whom he had a personal political connection, he was more than happy to spearhead a law he perceived (from California’s experience) would anger the teachers’ union in a legislative season marked by numerous bills with similar intent.

Such support from on high explains how a typically controversial bill that seemed to appear out of nowhere got signed into law with such ease and speed. Without a committed and powerful sponsor, and without a sustained advocacy network or resources to help school districts build community buy-in over the ensuing three-year implementation period, however, the law was doomed.

The many Florida districts who had had this requirement thrust upon them now had ample time to consider the work involved in making the change. And school communities had ample time to push back as they almost inevitably do when requested to make schedule changes, particularly when their school leaders don’t assure them that the changes are both critical and doable.

During this time it became clear to many school administrators and board members that they would be better off joining forces to repeal the law than doing the work necessary to follow it. Rethinking entrenched and complicated bus routes, minimizing temporary inconveniences that come with all change, and taking active steps to prevent and defuse community fears and anger, after all, requires time, effort, and creativity—and sometimes painful reassessments of priorities.

Without adequate resources to follow these and other established practices for effective change management and implementation, many school leaders understandably chose to preserve the status quo. Rather than seeking or following established change management practices, they ignited community furor by fueling myths and misconceptions about the impact of a change on sports or afterschool jobs and offering absurd new schedules or astronomical price tags as the “only” possible solutions.

Without a committed and powerful sponsor, and without a sustained advocacy network or resources to help school districts build community buy-in over the ensuing three-year implementation period, the law was doomed.

The message came through loud and clear that starting schools at times compatible with sufficient sleep is both logistically and financially impossible. One of the loudest protests came from a district that starts picking up students at 4:52 a.m.

Elected officials had no choice but to listen.

Writing on the Wall

At Start School Later we knew this was coming. From the beginning, the bill sponsors never responsed to offers by Start School Later and various sleep, health, and school transportation experts to send testimony or provide responses to common objections. Neither they nor Florida’s Department of Education responded to offers to provide implementation guidance to help districts find feasible, affordable ways to comply with the law.

Nor was there any interest in offers to connect districts with guidance regarding effective change management and implementation practices. The Florida legislature even offered funding to districts who wanted to explore these options early so that challenges might be identified and addressed. No one took them up on the offer.

When Start School Later sponsored a national conference on implementation last fall, not a single Florida district attended, although one of the initial bill sponsors did provide a video talking about how important this legislation was and encouraging other states to pass similar bills.

Local Control vs. Sleep Science

The reason Florida’s law imploded on itself was the same reason it was passed in first place: the interests of certain powerful adults.

Clearly children’s sleep, health, and well-being had little if anything to do with this fiasco. Nor, despite all the hype, did any serious concern about“local control,” which was never threatened by a statewide floor that protects children’s health and safety by keeping reasonable school start times off the chopping block every time a district faced a budget crisis. The 2023 law does nothing to keep districts from “locally controlling” the specifics of who goes to school when or even the specific hour that classes begin. It simply restricts districts from choosing hours that do not give students an opportunity to get sufficient sleep.

As Okaloosa County pediatrician and Start School Later chapter leader Lynn Keefe has noted, moreover, the concept of local control is inconsistent with the research underlying this law, which establishes that requiring teenagers to be in class at 7 a.m. is unsafe, unhealthy, and counterproductive. All the objections to the law fail to recognize its core premise that school hours are fundamentally a matter of public health and safety. That premise explains why it is the job of the the state, not local school districts, to set standards for school hours, just as they set standards for sports physicals or set concussion policies, the need for which doesn’t vary by zip code any more than a teenager’s need for sleep.