About School Break Dates

School Break Dates helps parents plan around the school year: when school starts and ends, when the breaks are, and which days the kids are home. We cover US public school districts, one page per district, with every date tied to the district’s official calendar.

Why we built it

Families plan trips, childcare and work around school breaks, often months ahead. District calendars are usually published as PDFs that are hard to read on a phone, and the sites that copy them rarely say where their dates come from or when they last checked. A wrong spring break date can mean a flight booked on the wrong week. We wanted one place where every date is easy to read, easy to add to a calendar, and shows its source.

How we verify every date

  1. We start from the district’s official calendar. For each district we find the current school-year calendar on the district’s own website (usually the board-approved PDF). We never use other calendar sites as a source.
  2. We read every date from that document, including color-coded calendar grids: first and last day, fall, Thanksgiving, winter and spring breaks, holidays, teacher workdays, early release days and weather make-up days. A date that is not on the document stays blank; we do not fill gaps with typical dates.
  3. Every calendar is read twice, separately, before it is published. We use an AI model (Anthropic’s Claude) to read each district’s official calendar two separate times; the second reading does not see the first. A calendar is published only when both readings agree and every automatic check passes, and every page links to the district’s own document so you can check it yourself. See what these checks have caught.
  4. Automatic checks catch misreads. Labor Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day and Memorial Day must fall on their actual dates; winter break must include December 25; Thanksgiving break must include Thanksgiving Day. When a district states its number of student days, our count of school days from the listed dates must match it.
  5. Every page shows its source and verification date. You can open the original document from each page. Calendars that do not pass every check are marked unconfirmed and kept out of search engines until they do.
  6. We re-check sources every day. When a district changes its calendar file, we re-read it, update the dates and the “verified” date, and the calendar feed you subscribed to updates too.
  7. Parents help. Every page has a “report a wrong date” form. Reports go to a review queue and are checked against the district’s document.

Right now 554 districts are verified. We add more districts regularly, starting with the largest.

Using our data

You may reuse the dates on this site under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license: please credit School Break Dates with a link to the page you used. The district’s own calendar remains the official source.

What we are not

School Break Dates is an independent website. We are not affiliated with any school district, school board, state education agency or the US Department of Education. District facts such as enrollment and location come from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data. School calendars can change after weather closures or board votes; for decisions that matter, confirm with your district.

Contact

Questions, corrections or a district you want us to add: hello@schoolbreakdates.com or the corrections form.