Milan School Start Date Remains Unpublished

Parents are asking when Milan Area Schools students will return to class, but the district has not published a start date or calendar for the 2026-27 school year.

Superintendent Ryan McMahon told the Board of Education on July 13 that the district provided a proposed calendar to the Milan Education Association in March but had not received an official response.

“We don’t have an official calendar yet,” McMahon said. “We have a draft calendar.”

McMahon said the district could share the proposed dates with families as tentative but had hesitated to publish a calendar that might change during contract negotiations.

“You don’t want one version out there and then it changes,” McMahon said. “But we’re pretty close to the point where we just kind of need to.”

Board Vice President Carrie K-Gutierrez encouraged the district to release the tentative start date, noting that families are trying to plan August vacations and the final weeks of summer.

Board President Thomas Faro also said the uncertainty needed to be resolved.

“It seems like a very simplistic request, when a school is going to start,” Faro said. “School’s going to start, we anticipate, in August. So my hope is that we will get an answer soon.”

After the meeting, MEA President James Brousseau told The Sun Times News that the union agrees with the proposed calendar but will not approve it separately from the rest of its contract with the district.

“We have let the district know that the MEA agrees with the calendar in principle, but we will not approve the calendar separately as it is part of the entire contract between Milan Area Schools and the Milan Education Association,” Brousseau said in an email.

Brousseau said the union also told the district several months ago that it could publish the dates as tentative.

Brousseau’s response indicates that the proposed dates do not appear to be the source of disagreement, although the calendar has not been formally approved as part of the full contract.

McMahon said the unfinished calendar has also affected required district reporting. Several general and special education reports due July 1 were completed using the draft calendar and may need to be revised if the dates change.

The current bargaining cycle follows difficult negotiations during the previous school year. The district and MEA reached a tentative wage agreement through mediation in February before completing that contract.

For now, families still do not have a published date for the first day of school.