The kids old enough to be on the streets are a plague when not in school.

The population of persons on our cul-de-sac triples after class when school is in secession and all day long during the summer break.

The parents have jobs or something and cannot be home to look after them. The labor laws have prevented the older ones from getting jobs.

I would gladly pay my increased school board assessment to keep the little brats locked up a few more hours and a few more days.

One quick remedy would be to do what researchers recommend: Start them later and keep them later. Mischievous high schoolers get into trouble in those 2-3 hours between the time they are let out of school and their parents get home. They then stay up all night on MySpace and idiot games (not doing homework), then cannot function during the first hour or two of the day. Starting school at 7:20 is patently ridiculous, but since we're so widely regarded as a "babysitting service", many parents would rather have convenience than maximize a child's educational opportunity.

From a parent:

Where is your sense of community? Maybe if you took time out to get to know these kids, offer them a glass of kool-aide, you would find that they are pretty neat, and not bother you.

Starting and ending later sound like great ideas at first. Then you look at the amount of homework that kids have, myself included. I took 3 AP classes this past year (the only 3 that our school offers to Juniors), and I did more work this year than I have in the past 2 or three years combined. I've stayed up until 1030pm or later working the entire time after I've returned home at 3pm. If my school catered to the slackers that "stay up all night on MySpace and idiot games (not doing homework)", there'd be no way for myself and other academically strong students to excel.