I also live in Florida with school age children so I have been playing this game for the last 8 years.
First, your spring break is controlled by your local school system. It can change year to year and is never published more than one year in advance.
In your home county, spring break for public school may be one week, for any colleges in your area another week, and for private schools almost any other week. Here in the Tampa Bay area only Pinellas and Sarasota Counties had the same week. Hillsborough, Manattee and Pasco all had different weeks as did St. Pete College, USF, and Eckerd College. Most private schools around here were the week before or after us.
Because the State passed a law last year that no public school could start more than two weeks before Labor day, schedules for many counties will be different for next year than from this year.
For the 4 years Pinellas County was week 12 (it was different before that but I can't recall what week). Becasue of the start date change we are week 13 next year. The school calander was in the news a bunch when they were deciding what to do. There is a good chance it will be changed again next year, depending on what the people bring back to the school board next year.
If your County uses Easter as it's Spring Break week every year you may be able to plan, but rememer Easter moves on the calander.
As others have written , week 7 is big in the Northeast. March is the busiest month of the year in Pinellas because it's always somebodys spring break somewhere, and they all seem to want to come here
. Pretty much, mid February through the first couple weeks of April are Spring Break weeks for someone.
FYI- The reason the state got involved with setting the schedule was becauase of FCAT testing. If you are in third grade next year that is an important test year for you, Good Luck!.
School funding is partly based on a schools FCAT score. Since testing is always done statewide at the same time in late February/early March, school districts figured the earlier they started school, the more they can teach the kids for FCAT. Thus, the hope was they would test higher bringing more $$$ to each school.
As a result, districts kept moving the start time earlier and earlier. One Forida district was ready to start school in July next year. (They would get out in April. Imagine what their spring break would have been!).
Now the playing field is level for all public school districts. We all can start no earlier than two weeks before Labor Day. That is three weeks later for us this year. For us that means a couple other things.
1- Three extra weeks of summer vacation this year.
2- Later start for summer vacation next year. Always got good travel deals for early summer vacation. Smaller crowds too. Going to miss that.
3- Have to compete with more people for summer deals and exchanges.
(ie: can't use a float week to reserve the weeks). I was hoping against hope that maybe Spring Break was normally one of say 3 weeks, so I could look to snag a few deals on those fixed weeks. Not to be.