#Parents are making deals with kids to skip spring break

This year, it’s the pandemic, not the partying, that’s got parents fearing spring break.

“COVID is my No. 1 concern,” mom of two Kellie Dennis told The Post. Dennis, who lives in Rhode Island, tweeted about her painful debate with her high-schooler about going on vacation to Fort Myers, Florida.

“I had to tell my son (16) that he could not go to Florida for spring break with his friend and his family. He was pissed but then got over it,” Dennis wrote on Twitter. “I felt like a horrible mom when I told him, but I knew that there was no way in hell he was going! Then I bought him an Xbox game he has been wanting!”

Dennis said she had to be “the bad guy” and used the Xbox “Call of Duty” game to soften the blow. “It was that mom guilt,” she said. “It was cheaper than sending him to Florida.”

After seeing that Miami Beach, the ultimate spring break destination, declared a state of emergency on Saturday and brought in a SWAT team to enforce curfew, Dennis was grateful for her motherly instincts. “Thank God I didn’t send him.”

Many other parents are also resorting to bribes to incentivize kids to skip the trip.

“They say, ‘I’m giving you a car for graduation!’ or ‘You want a nose job?’ ” said Amanda Uhry, who runs Manhattan Private School Advisors. “Parents will do anything to get their kid to stay home. Those who can afford it [bribe].”

But that isn’t the salve parents imagine. “Kids don’t want the cars — they want to hang out with their friends at Atlantis,” Uhry added. “Kids are myopic.”

“They all feel bulletproof,” one Upper East Side mom said of teenagers. She admitted she had to get creative to make things up to her two sons, one in high school and one in college in New Orleans, who both wanted to go away on spring break.

“I schlepped my whole family to New Orleans [to visit my son], so I could avoid skiing in crowded resorts,” the mom told The Post. “I promised [him] I’d treat all his friends to dinner if they’d just stay in town.”

Colleges are taking their own measures to clamp down on travel. Some universities are canceling spring break altogether, instead offering a few sporadic “health and wellness days” without classes as a compromise. University of California, Davis experimented by giving out $75 gift cards to students if they stayed on campus during spring break to curb the amount of kids jetting off to various locales.

NYU is among the colleges that reduced the number of days off for spring break in order to discourage superspreader jaunts. “This year, they only gave us a Friday off,” lamented one disappointed freshman. “They don’t want people to travel.”

She told The Post that students are too afraid to go away for fear of being ratted on by student snitches. Classmates telling on each other for breaking social-distancing rules has been rampant, she said, which is why she wanted to remain anonymous for this story.

“People will go out of their way to snitch on another person, if you posted a picture at a party,” she said, so she skipped her trip to avoid being shamed. “Florida would’ve been my dream . . . There’s a constant fear of getting caught.”

Many high school kids see the senior year spring break trip as a rite of passage — and, in 2021, a way to blow off steam after a year of sitting in front of a screen. But kids under 18 typically need a parent to chaperone their crew to destinations including the Bahamas, Cancun and the Caribbean, and that provides another issue.

“You don’t want to deprive your kid when your kid has already been deprived, but you don’t want to be the chaperone parent because you expose yourself to COVID,” said Uhry.

One downtown mom begrudgingly agreed to accompany her high school senior daughter and two friends to Florida in a few weeks.

“It was my way of getting her off my back when she kept asking, ‘Why can’t I go to the Bahamas?’ ” Knowing her daughter had “her heart set on going away,” the mom “made a deal” that she’d stay at a separate hotel.

She’s confident that her daughter will just be so grateful to go away, she’ll avoid mass gatherings and stick to beach chairs and dinners with her girlfriends.

Still, even though they’ll be in Tampa, away from the action of Miami, she’s bracing herself for mayhem. “When we get down there, I think it’s going to be another Woodstock.”