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Rep. Cabot offers bill to let northern Michigan districts extend school year after widespread ice storm
Summary
Representative Cabot testified in favor of House Bill 4,345 to allow local districts affected by a severe Upper Peninsula ice storm to extend the school year into July, citing weeks-long power outages, destroyed utility infrastructure and concentrated impacts in high-poverty counties.
Representative Cabot told the House Education and Workforce Committee that House Bill 4,345 would give local school districts affected by an extreme ice storm in northern Michigan flexibility to extend the school year into July without penalty.
Cabot described a multi-county emergency that cut power to roughly 300,000 residents and left some families without electricity for more than 20 days. "I was personally without power for 8 days," Cabot said. "People were not able to get out of their homes due to the fallen trees on the roads, power lines, radio towers." He urged the committee to adopt a narrowly tailored remedy to "hold those students harmless and hold our districts harmless."
Cabot and witnesses described the scale of damage: Great Lakes Energy had historically cited outages of about 60 poles in its worst storm, Cabot said, while this event knocked down about 2,800 poles; Presque Isle Electric and Gas lost substations and had to reengineer distribution for a six-to-eight county area. He also noted localized severity in counties with high child-poverty rates, and that some small districts already face a heavy number of missed instructional days — one superintendent reported "over 190 inches of snow" in a district, and another district had been without power for more than 20 days.
Committee members expressed sympathy and asked whether additional or broader relief should be considered for other major emergencies. Cabot said he and his office had relied on local superintendents and the regional intermediate school district for guidance and that the bill was written as an immediate, focused response rather than a more sweeping change.
Several education associations filed support cards that were entered into the record: the Michigan Association of Intermediate School Administrators, the Michigan Association of School Boards, the Michigan Association of Superintendents and the Michigan Education Association all submitted support and did not request to speak. The committee did not record a vote on HB 4,345 during the session captured in the transcript.
