School’s back in session, but whenever I go to Disneyland, I still see a bunch of kids.

You might think that school days would be the best days for grown-ups to visit Disneyland, with so many parents off at work and their children in school. But thanks to Disney’s wildly popular Southern California Select annual passport – the lowest-priced annual pass, which is valid pretty much only on school days – it’s hard to find a truly uncrowded day at the parks anymore.

Yet I’m always taken aback when I visit on a weekday during the school year and find the park crawling with families towing school-aged children. Adults with the day off I can understand. But are that many parents really pulling their kids out of school to spend the day at Disneyland?

Apparently so.

When I was a child, I couldn’t have imagined skipping school to go to Disneyland. Even in the bizarre universe where my super-strict parents would have agreed to the idea, I wouldn’t have wanted to go.

Of course, I was that kid, the goody two-shoes that actually believed my school kept a “permanent record” that noted every screw-up in my childhood. I was a sucker for rules, and the rules said that kids went to school on school days – not to Disneyland.

Even today, it’s hard for me to shake that thought. Yes, as a parent, I know that the people who think they know the most about parenting tend to be ones who don’t have any kids yet. So I try to shut up and not make judgments about what other parents do with their children. Get ’em to 18 alive, out of jail and with some hope for their future … and you’ve done well in my book.

But even though I cover theme parks for a living, I never took my kids out of school to visit a theme park. Part of that has to do with California’s crazy system for funding public education. Each day your children misses public school in California means less money for their school, and I knew our local schools need every dollar they can get. If they are sick, fine, stay home, but after spending countless hours on endless school fundraisers I didn’t want to undo any of that hard work by taking my kids out of class any day they were healthy.

I understand that many of the children enjoying Disneyland on weekdays aren’t officially skipping class since they’re home-schooled. But isn’t the whole point of home schooling that you should be at home, well, schooling?

Even taking field trips to the parks didn’t make much sense to me. Lots of parks sell group-rate tickets to schools with the promise that kids can learn about physics by riding roller coasters. I say the students would learn that lesson better by building their own model coasters in their classroom. But that wouldn’t sell any theme park tickets, and that wouldn’t give teachers an enormous carrot and stick to wave in front of their classes to keep them in line for the weeks leading up to the trip, so … there ya go.

The strangest theme park field trip I saw happened at my children’s elementary school, when a class in my son’s grade was sent to spend the day at Universal Studios Hollywood. Why? Universal needed their classroom that day to shoot a scene from an Adam Sandler movie.

Welcome to life in Southern California.

Another part of life in Southern California is that not everyone has a nine to five, Monday through Friday job. For people whose work schedule has them on the job when their kids are off at school, pulling them out of class might be the only way to enjoy a family day together. After all, it’s sometimes a lot easier to take your children out of class for a day than it is to get a paid shift off work during a school vacation – when everyone else wants the time off, too.

But as much as I try to understand all the reasons why people end up at Disneyland with their school-aged children on a weekday in September, I’m left wishing that they wouldn’t.

It’s not that I am insensitive. It’s just that I’m selfish. The more kids that spend their weekdays in a classroom, the fewer I’ll have to stand behind in line.

Stay in school, kids. I’m trying to get on Radiator Springs Racers without a wait.

Robert Niles is the founder and editor of ThemeParkInsider.com. Follow him on Twitter @ThemePark.