Abundance of School Holidays Leaves Families Scrambling for Childcare

“It’s unbelievable how expensive it is,” said Hollis Scarborough, a Washington Heights mother of two, about the costs of childcare on public school holidays.

This school year, Scarborough’s kids will have sixteen weekdays off, not counting the four longer school breaks. Sixteen days when she still has to work. Even though she runs her own consulting firm, she can’t have her first and fourth graders running amuck while racing to meet deadlines. So she’s left weighing what matters most every holiday: her productivity or her wallet.

New York City has expanded its public school calendar to reflect the city’s cultural and religious diversity, adding seven new holidays in the last three years. While those changes have brought recognition and joy to many communities, they’ve also left working families scrambling for childcare. With 950,000 students in NYC public schools, camps across the city have stepped up but struggle to balance staying profitable with remaining financially accessible.

The newest holiday addition is Diwali, added in 2024. For Sonya Kripalini, a Chelsea mother of two who celebrates Diwali every year, the observance is meaningful. “It brings awareness to kids that there are different religions and different cultures and we all celebrate different things,” she said. But the growing calendar has made life challenging for families on holidays they don’t observe.

Day camps operate in nearly every New York neighborhood, but few fit the schedules and budgets of working parents. Most camps run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., with extended hours for an added fee. Daily prices range from $120 to $240 per child, meaning parents of two could spend over $6,000 a year on single-day childcare alone.

“We depend on revenue from one-day camps to keep our other programs running,” said Anthony Alloca, manager of onsite programming at TADA! Youth Theater in Midtown, running camps for $185 a day.

While TADA! runs an after-school program that, with city funding, offers free year-round training, that same funding structure doesn’t exist for single-day care. Without subsidies, offering discounts would threaten the financial viability of their organization.

This funding gap hits middle-class families hardest. Government subsidies help the lowest-income families, but middle-class parents bear the brunt of childcare costs. Ai Asai, a mother of three said she often felt “helpless” trying to afford childcare until she found The Movement Creative, a parkour-based day camp in Central Park offering discounted pricing.

The Movement Creative charges $180 a day, with families able to save up to 40% through no-questions-asked discounting. “They’ve really been a saving grace,” Asai said.

Since its founding in 2012, The Movement Creative has centered accessibility in its programming. “We know this is a tale of two cities,” said co-founder Jesse Danger. While a fully public sliding-scale program once caused “added financial volatility,” they now offer tiered discounts to ensure financial stability while remaining committed to helping everyone.

Joni Wildman, executive director of Wildarts, on the Upper West Side, offers $95 day camps. According to Wildman, the neighborhood is one where “a lot of need sits right alongside a lot of wealth,” yet the city doesn’t allocate funding to moderately wealthy neighborhoods.

As a registered 501(c)(3), Wildarts aims to fill those gaps. But for Wildman, the responsibility shouldn’t fall on nonprofits alone. “We’re doing our part to keep prices low so that more people can afford us, but we need the city to step up.”