DID OUR INDUSTRY GIVE AWAY THE AMERICAN SUMMER?
Why Aren’t We Fighting to Reclaim August?

Sitting here in my office just returning from lunch, now looking out my window at better weather than we had at the end of July and during the beginning of August, I cannot help but remember when for decades, there was something almost sacred about the American summer.

For years, Memorial Day arrived, schools closed shortly thereafter, and families began what we traditionally called summer vacation. Theme parks, amusement parks, resorts, beaches, campgrounds, hotels, and virtually every other seasonal leisure business entered the most important operating period of the year. It was THE SUMMER VACATION! And then, generally, school did not begin again until around or after Labor Day.

Today, in much of America, that calendar is history. Schools increasingly remain in session well into June and then reopen in early or mid-August. In some communities, children are back in classrooms during what generations of Americans considered the heart of summer.

There is no question, we have squeezed summer from both ends. My question is simple. Why did the leisure and tourism industry allow this to happen without mounting a much broader, sustained effort to stop it? We certainly knew how to fight it once.

Remember the “Kings Dominion Law”? In 1986, Virginia enacted what became commonly known as the Kings Dominion Law, preventing most public schools from beginning before Labor Day unless they qualified for an exemption. The legislation became associated with Kings Dominion, Busch Gardens Williamsburg, and Virginia's tourism industry because tourism interests strongly supported preserving late August for family travel and maintaining the seasonal workforce attractions required.

And for decades, the tourism industry defended it. One Virginia tourism executive described those final August weeks as the industry's equivalent of “Black Friday” because of their economic importance to Doswell, Virginia Beach, Williamsburg, the Shenandoah Valley, and other state destinations.

Sadly for the industry, eventually the law was substantially weakened, and Virginia school systems gained far greater flexibility to begin before Labor Day.

So, stop for a minute and ask what happened? An industry once influential enough to preserve one of its most important operating periods gradually watched that protection disappear. Why?

What did education gain? This is where I believe our industry should have asked a much harder question. What measurable educational improvement did America receive in exchange for sacrificing part of the traditional summer? There is not a convincing body of evidence showing that simply moving the same school year deeper into August produces dramatic academic improvement. In fact, Old Dominion University's analysis of Virginia's experience found that the Kings Dominion Law had no significant impact on graduation rates, student retention, or standardized test scores.

In a separate academic examination of Virginia's experience, another university studied whether the post-Labor Day requirement affected retention and graduation and found little evidence supporting the contention that the later opening harmed educational outcomes.

Now let me point out that this does not mean school calendars are academically irrelevant. They are not. Instructional time, testing schedules, teacher contracts, snow days, and countless educational considerations all matter. But that raises my question again. If the required instructional days can still be provided, where is the overwhelming evidence that beginning school August 5, 10 or 15 instead of around Labor Day materially improves the education of America's children?

If that evidence exists, let's see it. If it doesn't, shouldn't we as an industry examine what we surrendered, as well as the impacts on travel and tourism?

We know what happened to family travel, and what I found is that the research is far less ambiguous. A peer-reviewed study using American Time Use Survey data examined school-start mandates and family travel. Researchers found a substantial decline in late-summer travel among families with children when schools started before Labor Day. The effect was unique to households with children and was not found among households without them. That confirms something operators have observed for years. When a child returns to school in early August, summer doesn't gradually wind down. For that household, summer effectively ends!

And as we have experienced, the last amusement park trip disappears. The weekend getaway disappears. The beach vacation gets shortened. Grandparents lose another week when they might travel with grandchildren. Hotels lose room nights. Restaurants lose meals and, sadly, attractions lose days of operation and attendance.

Now as an industry, when we multiply this by millions of families, this is not a minor calendar adjustment. From my perspective, through the years, it has become a major leisure industry economic issue. Young people have always been the important component of America's seasonal leisure workforce. Now to add injury to insult, as they say, we lose the employees at the same time. The employees we have spent time and money recruiting and training.

As we know, federal law makes the relationship between school calendars and employment very real. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds may generally work up to 40 hours during a non-school week, but only 18 hours during a week when school is in session, along with some additional daily limitations. Therefore, when schools reopen early, our industry loses two things simultaneously, those being the customer and the employee.

I have to stop and ask, “How many industries would willingly surrender both at precisely the same moment”?

And now for one more contributing factor, let’s add weather to the equation! This is another issue that makes this discussion even more timely.

Anyone who has operated outdoor attractions knows what oppressive mid-summer heat can do to attendance, guest comfort, food consumption, employee productivity, and guest length of stay. Yet as we have seen, late August into early September can provide a surprisingly attractive operating window in many markets.

The Virginia National Weather Service climate normals for Richmond show an average daily high of approximately 89.5°F in July, 87.5°F in August, and 81.2°F in September. In other words, just as temperatures in many markets begin easing from their midsummer peak, we are sending millions of our potential customers back to school. At the same time, the seasonal weather envelope itself is becoming longer.

We came upon a 2026 Climate Central analysis based on NOAA data which found that fall has warmed in 241 of 245 U.S. cities studied, with an average increase of about 2.9°F since 1970. September 1 is meteorologically the beginning of fall, but increasingly it doesn't necessarily feel like it.

Earlier research indicated that the last characteristically hot day of summer is occurring later in many American cities.

And the first freeze is arriving later in 85% of 200 cities examined, about 11 days later, on average, than in the early 1970s. There are obvious negative consequences to a warming climate, and I certainly would not minimize them. But from an attraction operating-calendar standpoint, the data tell us something important, which is that our viable outdoor leisure season is not necessarily getting shorter. In many places, it is extending later, and yet our traditional family vacation calendar has moved in exactly the opposite direction.

The reason I am writing this is because I wonder, what sense does that make? Why didn't we fight harder? This is the question that troubles me.

Certainly, our industry has become remarkably sophisticated. We lobby on visas. Taxes. Labor rules. Safety regulations. Development incentives. Transportation. Intellectual property. Immigration. Economic development.

But somehow, I ask again, how did we fail to recognize that the school calendar itself is one of the most consequential operating-calendar issues facing seasonal leisure businesses? Part of the answer may be structural. Public-school calendars are principally state and local matters. There was never one federal law that IAAPA or the tourism industry could simply go to Washington and change. But that doesn't mean we were powerless. Virginia proved that legislative action was possible. The tourism industry successfully defended its position there for more than three decades.

Perhaps what was missing was a national strategy implemented state by state.

Is it time to reclaim August?????

Now I am not suggesting that tomorrow every school in America should be ordered back to precisely the calendar we followed 50 years ago. That is unrealistic. But I am asking something much more practical, which is, “Is there a possibility that we can reclaim late August”?

Why shouldn't IAAPA, working with the U.S. Travel Association, hotel and lodging organizations, restaurant associations, destination marketing organizations, chambers of commerce, state tourism offices and other leisure interests, commission a “National School Calendar Economic Impact Study”?

Let's stop guessing and measure how early school openings affect these elements of tourism.

• Family vacation nights

• Theme Park and attraction attendance

• Hotel occupancy

• Restaurant spending

• Seasonal employment

• State and local tax revenues

• Employee availability.

• Family travel behavior

Then let’s place those findings beside the educational data. Let’s see what academic improvement is actually attributable to beginning school two or three weeks earlier? What economic and family activity is being sacrificed? And see if the same instructional requirements could be achieved with a different calendar?

If that gives us cause, then commission the development of a lobbying strategy, not necessarily in Washington, but in 50 state capitals.

AND LET ME STRESS………This should never be positioned as tourism versus education. That would be wrong and politically foolish. It should be about designing a school calendar that serves education, families, workers, and America's enormous visitor economy.

Our industry is so great, and it spends billions of dollars every year trying to create incremental attendance. From Disney to the mom-and-pop parks, we build record-breaking roller coasters, add hotels, expand water parks, create immersive lands, and add billions of dollars of attractions trying to gain another few percentage points of visitation.

Yet perhaps one of the industry's greatest opportunities doesn't require building anything. Maybe we simply need to reclaim several weeks we once had and that we gave away during August, and we do this one school district and one state at a time. That’s how it happened.

Maybe it is time for our industry and the broader tourism industry to determine what that has cost us, and whether we can get some of it back. It won’t be quick or easy. After all, it took time for it to dissipate. But after watching the American summer shrink for decades, I believe our industry should finally be asking, “why aren't we fighting to reclaim lucrative August”?

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