The Cost of Time

I remember the shock of going from the daycare schedule to the school schedule with our oldest daughter when she started going to Kindergarten. It started in the first two weeks. Why on earth is there an extra Friday off before Labor day? What could possibly be the reason to have a four-day weekend after just nine days of school? Imagine my surprise as I looked at the entire school calendar!

The Numbers

There are 250 working days in the year (261 if you don’t include federal holidays). The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average worker gets 10-14 days of vacation per year. (About 8% of the population has no paid time off at all.) There are 180 days of school per year. I think this is not great, but this is how we do school in America. We’ll include federal holidays because they come into the math later, so we’ll start with a concerning figure: 81 days, or roughly 16 weeks of time off from school. Some of this is vacation! We all love vacation. We get three weeks of it a year, on average. So that’s 13 weeks we have to find childcare or enrichment for our children — over 500 hours of care.

Summer Break

You would think the bulk of this is summer break, which from my memory as a child was endless (at the beginning) and too short (at the end). Summer break is a lot. It’s 10 weeks. This is baked into the structure of the school year. There are lots of articles about how planning for this is difficult, but generally there are camps for younger kids and you sign them up in late winter or early spring. Last year, we needed 8 weeks worth of camps, which was difficult but manageable. Most importantly, the city offers a heavily subsidized summer camp option. In 2025, here’s the pricing from the city website: “The Summer Power-On/Power-Up fee is $459 for the summer; $225 with documentation for free/reduced-price school meals and FREE with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits.” That is incredible! Great job, Alexandria. There are also relatively low-cost Parks and Rec camps, as well as private options that tend to be higher-cost.

The Hidden Days Off

Okay, so that accounts for summer, sort of. Where are these other 6 weeks of no-school going? They are buried in the school year! There are two big vacation blocks during the school year, winter break and spring break. Many families use these as vacation time, obviously, but the City also offers subsidized childcare options through Campagna Kids. Those are three weeks together.

We are still missing a lot of days, though. Going through the calendar, I counted 37 total days off during the school year. Six of these are federal holidays, and 15 more are long break days (winter and spring break). We’ll throw in the day after Thanksgiving, which might as well be a forced vacation day. Still, that’s a lot! There are 20 days during the school year that are either Federal holidays or just random days off. There are 15 that are just random days off! If it seems like we have a day off every other week, this is because it is literally the case that only half of the weeks during the school year are full weeks of school! And this is before snow days and sick days, which can further eat into parent’s time and budget.

The Real Cost

These days off are expensive, especially for elementary school parents. At a minimum, a day camp for a random day off costs about $100, if you get one of the (excellent) classes offered by the Parks and Rec folks (those people are saints). The median family size is two kids, so it’s about $200 per day off — way more than the cost for those weeks. What if you don’t put them in a camp? Taking time off from work (or just lost productivity if your work is flexible) is more expensive — the average hourly wage looks like it is about $35 per hour in Alexandria, so that’s $280 per day. Let’s conservatively assume that only elementary school kids need childcare, which is probably too low but that’s okay. It looks like there are about 7500 elementary school kids — if they all go to camp, that’s $750,000 per day off. If one parent from each household takes care of all of them, that’s over $1,000,000 per day off.

A million dollars a day when we don’t have school or when we cancel school. That’s a lot! I think people making the school schedule or making decisions think about the cost of their decisions abstractly, but I don’t think families have the luxury of doing so. These are real costs paid by families that we should account for in our decision-making. I’m sure my math could use some improvement, so please check my numbers or use your own assumptions about costs. But the costs are going to be substantial because of the scale and difficulty of childcare.

The Burden of Planning

One thing we didn’t price was the burden of planning and logistics that comes with time off. Every individual day off is another activity a parent has to plan. The feeling of constant stress and strain as we account for days off and search for camps and classes that can take our children — god forbid we forget one and all the classes are full — is very real. We need to support the entire family, not just the narrow range of needs of the school operations during the school day.