Yuen: You’re not imagining it. Kids in Minnesota spend less time in school than in almost every other state.

Before I had kids, I glimpsed a window into the insanity of summer child care when one of my friends at work shared with me the week-by-week patchwork of camps and clinics she thoughtfully stitched together for her child once school was out.

For those 12 weeks of summer, she explained, her 8-year-old couldn’t be left home alone while his parents were at work. So starting in January, she registered him for day programs that could occupy his time, keep him safe, and maybe activate his little neurons over the summer stretch.

Child care is not just a scramble for summer break (or MEA or winter break, for that matter). It’s every President’s Day, professional development day, parent-teacher conference day, inclement weather day, or any random time that school happens to be out. In Minnesota, parents expend even more mental labor figuring out child care because our kids spend less time in school than in almost every other state.

Out of the states which have mandated a minimum number of days in the school year, Minnesota requires fewer school days, second only to Colorado. Most states require that kids be in school 180 days of the year. Minnesota requires just 165.

Our state ranks 46th in the nation for the median total hours that students spend in public school a year (just ahead of Oregon, Rhode Island, Maine, Nevada and Hawaii).

The gaps add up over time. When researchers Matthew Kraft of Brown University and Sarah Novicoff of Stanford University analyzed the disparities, they found that students living in the five states with the highest median number of school hours are in school a whopping 1.4 more years compared to students living in the five states with the lowest median hours over the course of their K-12 education.

When school’s out, it’s up to moms and dads to scrap together a plan.

“Minnesota is one of the states that has the fewest required school days, so it’s even harder for Minnesota parents than parents throughout the rest of the country,” said Meredith Englund, founder and CEO of Camperoni, a Twin Cities-based startup that helps parents discover out-of-school care for their kids. “Child care is a need, not a want.”

You’ll find me particularly on edge this time of year, when the most coveted summer camp spots fill up within minutes of registration systems going live. Camperoni offers a free website that parents can use to search for camps and child care programs by location, interest, cost and other filters. It also offers a “concierge” service, for $295 a year, that provides families with a tailored plan for summer and school breaks based on their needs and children’s interests.

Now that I’m a parent of school-age children, I feel the urge to grab people by the shoulders and rustle the general population awake: Working parents are in a bind! In one week in January, my kids were in school for only two days because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an arctic blast, and teacher grading day. Fortunately, I have the option to work from home; many parents do not. By Englund’s estimates, for about a quarter of all weekdays in the year, Minnesota parents are working while their kids are out of school.

Parents are also feeling the squeeze today as more employers like Golden Valley-based General Mills ramp up their back-to-the-office mandates. And in greater Minnesota, parents must be wondering how they would scrape by as more cash-strapped districts consider shifting to a four-day school week. Where will their children go on that fifth day?

One reason why Minnesota kids aren’t in school as much as their peers around the country is because state law prohibits districts from starting the school year before Labor Day. While the statute does allow for some exceptions, it sure doesn’t give districts much local control to create their own calendars.

When he was a state legislator, former Rep. Carlos Mariani Rosa naively tried to change the law to make it easier for school administrators to call class to order as early as late August.

“You would think it’s not controversial. It’s phenomenally controversial,” said Mariani Rosa, a DFLer who runs the St. Paul-based advocacy group Minnesota Education Equity Partnership. “The opposition I had from the commerce sector, particularly tourism, was pretty fierce.”

Whenever a bill like this surfaces, rental cabin and resort owners in lake country argue that starting school before Labor Day would be disastrous to their bottom line. County and state fair organizations also would be disrupted. Proponents of the late school start wax poetic about the need for children to have unique experiences and family bonding time, especially during our too-short summers in Minnesota.

But who is that policy serving?

The families that stand to gain the most are those who can take off from work and have the money to enjoy cabin country, visit the State Fair, or sightsee in Europe. They are the children whose parents, like me, can afford to send them to cardboard-weapon building camps or computer-coding clinics.

Left behind are the students whose parents are working in low-paying, inflexible jobs. Their kids may be staying at home, playing on their screens, or babysitting younger siblings.

When his children were young, Mariani Rosa remembers enrolling them in science camps at local museums or in specialty classes at the University of Minnesota. Now he helps pay for his grandchild’s summer camps.

“Who benefits from fewer instructional school days?” he said. “Those who have the wherewithal to fill in those times with academic enrichment and experiences. A lot of low-income families don’t have that.”

Meanwhile, math and reading scores across the country are still in the tank, five years after the start of the pandemic. Only 28% of Minnesota eighth-graders, for example, are meeting federal reading proficiency standards.

Now would be a good time to consider trying something new to help students catch up. How about more time in school?

“More time in instruction is better than less time in instruction, and that’s especially true for marginalized communities,” Mariani Rosa said.

The 2024 study by Kraft and Novicoff found that schools that substantially increase their students’ total time in school can improve student achievement. But how that time is used matters, the researchers concluded. It must be spent effectively in ways that align with academic goals.

Since taking office last month, President Donald Trump hasn’t addressed the child care crisis. He signed an executive order that combats “radical indoctrination” in schools but hasn’t said anything about the exorbitant costs of child care and the pressure on parents to find programs when school is out. These are the concerns that keep most parents awake at night, particularly in Minnesota, a national leader in its share of women who work.

School is a form of child care. Child care is necessary for the economy. Student achievement in our state is falling.

Seems like we could take a stab at solving more than one problem by considering more school days for Minnesota kids.