Last year, Amanda Mann picked up her 11-year-old from school in Upstate New York for an appointment — which turned out to be a surprise trip to Southern California, featuring a ride on the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner to San Diego, a museum visit and two days at Disneyland.
Her child missed a couple of school days during the trip, but Mann was not concerned. She typically works to schedule absences around breaks to minimize the number of missed days, but she said her kids have gained life experience and maturity from travel that they couldn’t learn in a classroom.
“As long as my kids are on top of their grades, I have zero problems with the number of days they miss,” said Mann, who owns a travel agency called Living With the Magic Vacations.
As parents weigh overcrowded destinations, high travel prices and school calendars — not to mention their own work schedules — many are opting for off-peak family trips that take children out of the classroom. The choice is not without controversy.
It’s 2025 and I actually have parents trying to defend pulling their child out of school for a vacation. I get a death. I get granny is turning 100 and lives out of state. But to get a cheaper vacation- nope. Can’t ever support that.
— The Principal’s Office (@educator4ever36) October 12, 2025
Gail Johnson, a retired principal from the Atlanta area who still works as a substitute teacher, waded into the debate in a post on X last year saying that she could never support kids missing school just to go on vacation for a bargain. It was a request she fielded frequently as an administrator — and a type of absence she declined to excuse.
Parents shot back in reply, calling her arrogant, a heartless bureaucrat and “reason #4,683 to homeschool.”
“I was absolutely, I think they call it, ratioed,” she said. Her comment struck a nerve amid a larger debate around how much control parents should have over children’s educations. The conversation made it to a “Today Show” segment called “The Internet’s Divided.”
“I felt like this was a very superficial thing, a vacation,” Johnson said. “Boy, did I learn it was not.”
A popular choice
The topic will often come up in conversation with clients, Mann said, especially when traveling during the school year can bring significant savings. She said the “mom guilt” can be strong as parents question whether the trip is worth missing school.
“They’re not looking at all the positive aspects of travel,” she said. “They’re looking at vacation as being this silly little thing.”
But families aren’t immune to the benefits of traveling during off-peak “shoulder season.” Intrepid Travel, a small-group tour company, said October is its biggest month for North American families traveling outside the usual school-break times. Overall, the company’s North American family bookings have increased 32 percent year over year.
Leigh Barnes, president of Intrepid Travel North America, said in a statement that the company is seeing families maximize shorter school breaks outside of summer and take trips in May, September and October, months when school is typically in session. Intrepid has added more family departures in October, February and March in response.
The downside
School districts generally excuse absences for illness, a family member’s death or religious holidays. And educators interviewed for this article agreed that some trips warrant missed school days.
But they said students in all grade levels can suffer from missing time in the classroom. And the impact could spill over to classmates and teachers, who may need to spend extra time to help the traveling student catch up.
“If you can avoid taking a family vacation during school days, you should avoid it,” said Hedy Chang, founder and CEO of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that works with school districts to reduce chronic absences.
Depending on the district, missing too much school without an approved excuse can trigger penalties. In D.C., for example, the public school system will send an attendance notification to a student’s family in collaboration with police after seven full-day unexcused absences. If a student age 5 to 13 reaches 10 unexcused absences, the school system will refer them to the District’s Child and Family Services Agency.
“What’s a mistake is to assume you can just miss school and there are no consequences,” Chang said. “It may not be punitive. But there could still be consequences to your kids’ learning and development.”
Rules of thumb
Johnson said parents who are planning to pull children out of school should communicate in advance with teachers and administrators to establish how they might make up work that they miss or complete assignments during the trip.
After returning, she said, parents should make sure children show up to whatever tutoring or extra assistance they need to stay on top of the work.
Jason Currie-Olson, a longtime high school teacher in South Dakota, said he tries to communicate to parents that everyone needs to be on the same team to get students caught up on work they miss.
He said he has been supportive of travel by students, including one who went to the Galápagos Islands last year, which he called “genuinely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
“As someone who is an experiential human, I think there are things in our life that we learn from not staying in our same place,” Currie-Olson said.
Learning from vacation
Carrie Kirby, who writes the travel blog Miles on a Dime, went with her family on a two-week trip to Australia in 2016 for a cousin’s wedding. The trip required taking her three children out of school, but they were not considered absent because they arranged to bring work assignments on the trip under education rules in California.
The kids learned about venomous spiders at the Australian Reptile Park, hiked in national parks, swam in the ocean, encountered a kangaroo at Taronga Zoo Sydney and toured a botanic garden. They also brought work with them for a two-week trip to England and Denmark in 2015 for a vacation planned around a different wedding, and to Lake Tahoe for a week.
“My overall philosophy was definitely that I felt like there were a lot of things they could learn out in the world,” said Kirby, though the long trips stopped as the children got older and felt as though they couldn’t miss as much class time.
Elizabeth Richardson’s kids, in kindergarten and fourth grade, go to a year-round school in North Carolina that gets a shorter summer break but longer breaks throughout the year than traditional schools.
“So they’re often telling us: ‘You really shouldn’t be missing school to go on vacation because we have a lot of breaks during off time,’” said Richardson, an author who works in communications at a university.
But early last year, when the family had a chance to go to Costa Rica for a week, she applied for an educational absence for her older son. He got a packet with homework and wrote about what he did and learned on the trip. Then that era ended when the school said it would no longer approve educational absences.
Richardson, whose husband is a principal at another school, said she will keep making the most of the kids’ breaks. She wants to take them to London but knows missing a week of school for a trip to Europe, for example, wouldn’t fly.
“I’m not going to get away with that,” she said.
The post Is it ever okay to miss school for vacation? The answers can be controversial. appeared first on Washington Post.
