End of Summer 2019 Crowds at Walt Disney World
By Dave Shute
Every year, with the help of one of my niecelets, I collect the calendars for the upcoming school year for about 15 million US schoolkids—about a third of the US schoolkid population.
I weight these calendars, by state, based on the respective contribution of that state to this website’s visits, graphically analyze them, and use the results to note how the ability of kids to be easily out of school can affect Walt Disney World crowds.
I usually do this work in June, for the simple reason that while some school districts have no trouble posting their calendars for the next three or four years, some districts in some particular states—and yes, I am glaring at you, Michigan, and a bit at you, New Jersey—have problems getting out the next school years’ calendar even by early June.
This year, the niecelet and I launched this work early, as while I had no idea that Star Wars would partially in late August, I did suspect we would get an opening date before my traditional June presentation of this work.
The niecelet turned over to me her first pass through the ~280 districts we track at the end February (we track the 100 largest school districts, regardless of location, and then another 179 large districts mostly east of the Rockies, in states that contribute most of the visitors to this site), and we had then calendars for about 64% of the districts that schooled 69% of the 15.4 million kids we track.
By early April, I declared in victory on this early round of data collection, with calendars for 90% of districts and 89% of kids—13.7 million–in hand. I’ll am now publishing a series on the results of this work, and after the series is out, will be revising the second half of my 2019 crowd calendar.
This first one is about when summer 2019 school breaks end.
2019 SCHOOL BREAKS AND END OF SUMMER CROWDS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD
Kids in my data set start going back to school in late July, but aren’t back to school in appreciable numbers until the week of August 11. At the beginning of that week, about 12% of kids are back in school, and by the end of it, more than 45% of kids are back in school. The 50% level is crossed on Monday, 8/19/2019.
Numbers of kids back in school build slowly over that, hitting about 74% of kids in school by Labor Day, and then by the Friday after that holiday, every kid is back in school.
See the chart, where each column represents the percentage of kids back in school by that date. Weekends are in black, Labor Day in red, and the Star Wars partial opening date of August 29 is in orange. (Larger version here.)
Of note, 73.4% of kids are back in school by the Star Wars partial open. This is one of many reasons that I have noted elsewhere for why I don’t think the opening will be as crushed as many fear. Note that I do think it will be crushed—just not as badly as many think.
Kelly, the long-time travel agent partner of this site, can help you book your Walt Disney World vacation–in the summer of 2019, or another time! Contact her using the form below.
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