MISSAUKEE COUNTY —Lake City Area Schools is scheduled to reopen on Friday, March 20, 2026, after being closed since the previous Friday due to a severe ice storm.
While most area districts returned to session earlier in the week, Lake City officials remained closed as 15% of county roads remained impassable and thousands of residents lacked electricity.
The closure continued as Missaukee County worked to recover from peak outages that affected 89% of the county. A state of emergency was declared locally and by the state of Michigan to support restoration efforts, with approximately 2,000 customers still waiting for power to be restored as of Thursday.
Road conditions played a significant role in the delayed reopening of schools. Superintendent Tim Hejnal said the county road commission has worked continuously to clear debris, yet 15% of roads remained impassable as of Thursday.
“We still have people that are living in those conditions that haven’t been able to receive power yet, or have debris or trees removed from their homes or wherever else, so their roads are still impassible,” Hejnal said.
The district chose to wait for additional progress to ensure the safety of students and employees. The widespread nature of the outages also affected the district’s workforce. Hejnal confirmed that 40 members of the teaching staff were still without electricity this week, which influenced the decision to remain closed through Thursday.
“If 40 of our teachers, which is a really I mean, that’s a big number of them are in that situation. I was willing to believe that a number of our students were as well,” Hejnal said.
Missaukee County Emergency Management Director Linda Hartshorne -Shafer reported that 18.4% of the county, or approximately 2,000 customers, still lacked power on Thursday afternoon. This is a significant decrease from the height of the storm’s impact.
“We were around 89% out,” Shafer said. “And as they were working through, it would kind of fluctuate. We stayed between probably 77% and 85% for the better part of a couple of days.”
She noted that many of the remaining outages are located in isolated areas in the eastern part of the county where clearing fallen trees takes more time.
The extended closure has exhausted the district’s allotted snow days for the year. Hejnal said the district may have to add five days to the end of the school year unless the state provides a waiver. He pointed to a precedent from the previous year where storms in northern Michigan led to legislation allowing for up to 15 extra forgiveness days for impacted schools.
“I know that last year, that precedent, if it’s a precedent, was set with the storms north of here, which we’re we’re, awful as well, but that let it sway to some legislation which allowed for extra forgiveness days, up to 15 days for the schools that were impacted,” Hejnal said.
Consumers Energy has deployed more than 200 crews to the Lake City and Cadillac region to accelerate repairs. This includes 40 line worker crews and 20 tree crews focused specifically on trimming branches so repairs can be made safely.
Greg Salisbury, Consumers Energy senior vice-president and president of electric distribution, said crews have been in the area since the storm began. “We’re really close to wrapping up here in the Lake City area and the broader Cadillac region,” Salisbury said. “We have more than 200 crews here in Lake City. We have about 40 crews, including, line workers and then another 20 tree crews who were just out trimming the branches and trees so that our line workers can safely get in and finish restoring power.”
Consumers Energy officials said they expect restoration efforts to be largely completed on Thursday night. “We expect to be largely wrapped up tonight with maybe a few overnight and into the morning, because as the ice begins to melt, the trees tend to pop back up and we’ll have a few repeats,” Salisbury said.
Students in the Lake City Area Schools district are scheduled to return to classrooms on Friday morning.