Early Release Hassles

In the few posts I have written on my Patch blog, none of them really fall into the category of an opinion piece. I like to avoid stirring up trouble. With today being the first early release day of the school year, I find myself wanting to make an exception. When the school system posted a reminder on the Facebook page yesterday, it brought a few people, myself included, to question the logic behind early release days. There are five in this year's calendar. Three of them are for parent/teacher conferences and two are for "Professional Development". 
First of all let me go ahead and say that I am in no way against teachers having training time during the school year, or them being paid for this time. I feel that is a positive use of time and funds. However, I feel strongly that we need to look at how it is done. 
In theory an early release day almost makes sense. The kids get instruction time, lunch, and the afternoon off. The school gets credit for having the kids for a full day, and the teachers, well it is kind of a hassle for them any way you look at it. In practice the picture looks a little differently. Because of the shortened schedule lunch times are rearranged. Today my high school student went to lunch at 9:45 AM. My elementary student will have a cold lunch in his classroom. Middle school students have their class times reduced to 25 minutes each. This leaves just enough time for taking roll and assigning whatever work would have been done in class as homework, thereby eliminating that perk of the afternoon off for students.  Teachers are faced with a restless class who are all off of their routine. After what probably seems like a full day, they are asked to go to training until past the time they would usually get home.  
Up until a couple of years ago, early release days were on Fridays and often leading into a long weekend. Many parents saw this as a way to get an early start on vacation. Some even decided that since their child would not be benefiting from the day, they would take their child out altogether.  I understand where this would become a problem, but instead of addressing the real issue of half days, the school system moved those days to Wednesday. This is a real hit to families that have parents working outside the home. The private working sector knows that half days are not productive, which means parents have to take a full day of vacation in the middle of the week. 
My question is, wouldn't it be better to start the school year one day earlier, and combine the development days into one full day off?
The county's reply is the same as every year. "If you have recommendations to improve how we offer professional development for our staff, please submit it online in Oct. when we release the draft of the 2014-15 calendar." (quote taken from the comments on the original facebook post).
I have gone through filling out the official form. I know several of my friends have as well. I will continue to do so. I am coming around to the idea that it might be time for me to brush up on Robert's Rules of Order and start attending school board meetings, or at least the ones that involve adopting the school calendar. 
To end on a positive note, I would like to say that I feel incredibly blessed that one of my biggest annoyances with our local school system is something as simple as this. 
What is your take on early release days? How do your children feel about them? Is there some important detail I've missed that makes this beneficial to our teachers and students?