It’s official: Parents will have to scramble for child care the first week in September, according to the 2026-27 public school calendar.

The city’s education department released the calendar for the coming school year Tuesday after facing a growing chorus of grumbling from educators and parents eager to plan their schedules.

Per union contracts, the city’s schools always start the Thursday after Labor Day to provide teachers two days to prepare their classrooms. Labor Day comes late this year, pushing the first day to Sept. 10. The last day of public school will be June 28, a Monday.

The school calendar is a knotty challenge for policymakers and parents. By law, the city is required to hold 180 instructional days. But meeting the instructional requirement has become a more vexing challenge due to the recent additions of cultural holidays to the school holiday calendar. That has left little wiggle room for unexpected disruptions like snow storms, floods, extreme heat days, and wildfire smoke.

In February, Mayor Zohran Mamdani successfully lobbied state lawmakers for a waiver for the first old-fashioned snow day in years, forgoing remote learning and allowing kids to frolic in the flakes. But the city faced typical challenges with remote learning when it closed for a subsequent snow day, and then reopened as roads were still being cleared.

Other highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspective) on the new calendar include Election Day, which will be a remote day for kids since schools are used as polling places.

Several holidays fall on weekends or during breaks on the school calendar. Diwali begins on a Sunday, while Juneteenth is on a Saturday.

June is always a Swiss-cheese school schedule, packed with holidays and days off for kids while teachers have conferences or clerical days — not to mention the crush of testing, field trips and performances. Some parents call the hectic month “June-cember.”

This coming June, all students but those at stand-alone high schools will be off June 8 for a clerical day for teachers, followed by a day back on, before all kids have the day off on June 10 for Anniversary Day/Brooklyn-Queens Day.

Parent Deborah Alexander said that the frequency of holidays, days off and remote days places a heavy burden on parents while diminishing instruction.

“It’s frustrating,” she said. “Kids can’t learn if they aren’t in school.”