16, making it the most popular start week. When start dates were staggered by school or grade level, we used a date range.Īll told, 124 of the districts in our sample (representing 29% of students) are starting school between Aug. (Kindergartners often start school later than their older peers.) Although a handful of districts are on some form of year-round schedule, and many others have individual schools that operate year-round, we focused on the “traditional” calendars followed by most schools in a given district. Our final sample covered about 36% of the nation’s 50.6 million public elementary and secondary students.įor each district in the sample, we determined the date or dates on which most of their first-through-12th graders started fall classes. We excluded private and parochial schools, public charter schools, state-run schools and other educational institutions that often operate on their own schedules. We also examined additional districts in Texas, Florida and California, so that the final 509-district sample would include the nation’s 100 biggest districts. To get a sense of when students head back to school, we looked at the 10 largest local school districts by enrollment in each state (except for Hawaii and the District of Columbia, which have only one district apiece). 22, and one (subject to a special provision) on Aug. Still, six of the 10 Virginia districts in our sample are starting their 2019-20 school years after Labor Day two will open Aug. Earlier this year, the law was amended to permit districts to open up to two weeks earlier, so long as they also give students a four-day Labor Day weekend. For example, since 1986 Virginia’s “Kings Dominion law” (named for the amusement park just north of Richmond) barred most schools in that state from opening before Labor Day. Historically, the tourism and hospitality industries have favored later back-to-school dates, arguing that they give families more time to take vacations and teenagers more time to work summer jobs. Later starts are more common along the East Coast (from Maine to North Carolina), the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan) and the Northwest (Oregon and Washington). 9 – the latest opening date in our sample.īroadly speaking, earlier starts are more common in the South and Southwest: In a rough band of 13 states stretching from Arizona to Florida and up to South Carolina, 79% of the districts we examined will be back in school by the end of this week. At the other extreme are the Trenton, New Jersey public schools, whose nearly 14,000 students won’t go back to school till Sept. The 44,000 or so students in Chandler Unified went back July 23 (though they get the first of three two-week “intersession” breaks starting Sept. The prize for the earliest start date among the 500-plus districts in our sample goes to Arizona’s Chandler Unified School District, which serves part of suburban Phoenix. But not a single district in the nine New England and Middle Atlantic states will resume classes before Aug. By the end of this week, for example, nearly all elementary and secondary school students in the East South Central region – a Census Bureau division that includes Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee – will be back in school. And depending on where you live, that statement might produce a reaction of either “That sounds about right” or “That seems way too early!”īack-to-school dates in the United States, it turns out, vary considerably by state and region, based on our analysis of a sampling of the nation’s 13,000-plus public school districts. It’s the second full week of August, which means millions of American schoolkids are heading back to school or have already started. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images) The district is among the 22% of public school districts that start classes after Labor Day. First-graders quietly head into the cafeteria at Tulip Grove Elementary School in Bowie, Maryland, on Sept.
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