Congress restores funding to rural schools

from Carolyn JonesCalMatters

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Rural schools and communities are poised to receive millions in funding after Congress resurrected a program left for dead several months ago.

The Secure Rural Schools Act, which Congress passed overwhelmingly this week, heads to President Donald Trump for final approval. That would bring in $471 million for schools, roads, fire prevention, public safety and other critical needs. In California, 39 counties will share more than $40 million.

“It’s absolutely incredible,” said Jaime Green, superintendent of Trinity Alps Unified in Trinity County, which stands to receive nearly $4 million from the bill. “A lot of people worked very hard to make this happen. I’ve never been more proud of our country than I am right now.”

Secure Rural Schools was created a century ago to reimburse communities that have large tracts of tax-exempt federal land. The program was funded almost continuously until this year, when apparently became a victim to pressure from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate programs it deems wasteful.

But the relentless bipartisan violence by rural politicians and school officials has apparently worked. Green, for example, visited Washington more than a dozen times to push for the bill. Congressman Doug LaMalfa, a Republican who represents much of northeastern California, hounded Speaker Mike Johnson for months until he put it on the House calendar for a vote. A bipartisan group of more than 80 senators and representatives send a letter to Johnson last week asking him to expedite the bill.

Public pressure, fueled in part by CalMatters coveragealso matters, Green and others said.

Razor-thin budgets

Money is especially important for rural communities because overall funding is so low to begin with. Rural school districts often operate on thin budgets, with very little extra money to offset changes in revenue. Trinity County, where 70 percent of the land is owned by the federal government, expected layoffs, program cuts, delaying expensive renovations and other money-saving measures to make up for the loss of Secure Rural Schools funding.

Districts received their last Secure Rural Schools payment in March. The current bill would reimburse counties for the past nine months and cover the next two years. The first checks will arrive 45 days after Trump signs the bill.

“When the program expired, rural schools and districts were cut off from the funding they rely on to provide essential services,” LaMalfa said. “This bill restores that funding and keeps future payments on schedule.”

He added that a long-term solution would be for the government to help rural communities rebuild their timber economies, so programs like secure rural schools are not needed.

Another long-term solution would be to expand Secure Rural Schools from a 3-year account to a 5- or 10-year account, said Alan Carver, Siskiyou County Superintendent, who would receive more than $4 million through the bill.

This would allow schools to make more permanent funding decisions — such as hiring classroom aides — and not have to continually lobby for the bill’s passage. A longer-term bill covering at least one presidential term would also avoid some political clashes in Washington, he said.

“We’re all celebrating today. It was really a total effort,” Carver said. “But we’d like to see a permanent solution to this, so we’re not going to be back there advocating in a year.”

Other abbreviations on the horizon

James Gore, a Sonoma County executive and former president of the National Association of Counties, agreed that safe rural schools should be freed from the shifting political winds in Washington. Not only does it have strong bipartisan support, but the money is absolutely necessary for rural schools, he said.

“This is an unequivocal lifeline for children in rural communities,” he said. “We’ll take the win, but it’s a shame that something so important was used as a bargaining chip.”

The battle is far from over, he added. Rural communities, which are disproportionately low-income compared to their urban and suburban counterparts, face federal cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and other programs that will have a much greater impact on residents’ daily lives, he said.

“We all know that reform is needed,” Gore said, citing cuts to social services in the Republican spending bill, also called the One Big Beautiful Bill. “There are going to be so many more battles over the next few years. Protected Rural Schools is just the first of 10 or more.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.