Jaime Green, superintendent of the Trinity Alps school district in rural northern California, doesn’t attend professional development conferences like most people in his role.
Instead, he spends the vast majority of his travel time on Capitol Hill, urging members of Congress to pass the latest version of the Secure Rural Schools Act, which provides crucial funding for rural districts where abundant national forest land limits the amount of taxable property within district boundaries and thus the amount of funding they can draw from local taxpayers.
Green estimates he’s met with 85 members of Congress during his six years leading the 700-student district. “I’ve probably met with close to half of the Senate. I’ve been in all their offices,” he said.
So far, his latest round of advocacy hasn’t yielded the desired result. An extension of the Secure Rural Schools Act has languished in the current session of Congress. If it doesn’t pass before the 2025-26 school year, school districts in more than 700 counties will lose a funding stream they’ve come to depend on.
Many school districts can weather financial ups and downs by raising taxes on residential property. Green and hundreds of his peers in rural areas of more than 40 other states don’t have that same ability.
That’s because large swaths of their districts are national forest land, which has been owned and protected by the federal government since President Teddy Roosevelt made land conservation a priority during his administration in the early 20th century.
In the decades following the Roosevelt administration, the federal government required timber companies harvesting wood from national forests to share a portion of their profits with local school districts. But as the timber industry dried up, schools began to suffer financially.
Congress passed the Secure Rural Schools Act of 2000 to help make up the difference. Money from the program flows from the Forest Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, through a complex formula to more than 700 counties that collectively include 4,400 school districts and 190 million acres of national forest land, or 8 percent of all the land in the United States.
Counties then divide up the set of funds known as Title I—unrelated to the well-known federal funding for schools with large shares of low-income students—among all the school districts in their borders. At least 50 percent of the Title I funds have to go to schools; the rest can go to schools or pay for road maintenance. (Title II funds are for forest projects, and Title III funds are for emergency management.)
In total, the most recent iteration of the program allocated $253 million across states in a single year. Close to 20 percent of that money went to counties in one state—Oregon. Counties in states that don’t have any national forests, including Connecticut, Hawaii, and Maryland, don’t get any money.
Two of the original bill’s authors are still in Congress. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., are pushing to extend the legislation through 2026 in the coming months, their spokespeople told Education Week.
Wyden “considers this topic urgent business for Oregon and rural communities throughout America,” Hank Stern, a spokesperson for the senator, said in a statement. “He will keep pressing the case to get this done on a bipartisan basis.”
Crapo “remains active in conversations with leadership to get it across the finish line,” said spokesperson Melanie Lawhorn.
Losing federal funds could cost educators their jobs
In Green’s district, the most recent allocation was $600,000, or more than $857 per student. That’s 5.4 percent of the district’s total operating budget of $11 million, or roughly $15,700 per student.
If the Trinity Alps district loses $600,000 for future school years, Green said he’ll have no choice but to start sending layoff notices as early as March, in order to comply with California law.
For many districts, seven staff members may seem like a small price to pay. But in a rural district like Green’s, every cent, and every staff member, is “very important,” he said. The district has roughly 100 staff members total.
Trinity County, which contains Green’s district and several other small ones, is roughly the size of Rhode Island with only 1 percent of Rhode Island’s population. Many students live more than an hour away from their school buildings. Residents travel an hour-and-a-half in any direction for the nearest populated area.
The federal government also supplies money to rural school districts through a U.S. Department of Education program called the Rural Education Achievement Program. But districts have to apply for that money, which eats up administrative time. Green’s district got only $10,000 the last time his district applied—less than 2 percent of what the district gets from Secure Rural Schools.
Unlike many state and federal grants, Secure Rural Schools funds come without strings attached for districts. The Pocahontas County district in West Virginia, for instance, counts its $320,000 allocation as equivalent to three staff positions, but the money also helps pay for utilities, bus fuel, and other expenses, said Sherry Radcliff, the district’s superintendent.
“It kind of joins together to make a big sum, which helps us when our state aid isn’t enough,” Radcliff said.
Losing that money would mean layoffs, and further delaying long-needed building maintenance. Two schools in the 920-student district still don’t have air conditioning, even after federal pandemic relief aid paid for air conditioning in two other schools.
Technology costs for the district are also higher than for the average school system. One elementary building is within a Quiet Zone—an area of land where wireless devices are strictly forbidden to prevent interference with the nearby Green Bank Telescope, a research instrument shaped like a disc that covers 2.3 acres and collects radio waves. That means all devices have to run on ethernet cables—no-Wi-Fi.
“If we have to keep the buildings up, then people will have to be let go,” Radcliff said. “You either do one or the other.”
Raising property taxes likely won’t be an option, either. The area in general is high-poverty: two-thirds of the district’s students are eligible for free and reduced-price meals. But property values are high because of the nearby Snowshoe ski resort, Radcliff said. As a result, raising taxes tends to be politically unfeasible, as poor and wealthy families balk at higher costs, she said.
Hiring special education staff and interventionists proves challenging because strong candidates tend to gravitate toward schools across the nearby border with Virginia, which can offer higher salaries.
Meanwhile, state aid hasn’t kept up with inflation, she said.
Permanent funding could help districts plan for the future more effectively
The stakes are high for rural schools, which often struggle to gain political traction compared with their higher-profile urban and suburban counterparts.
Bode Gower, a senior at Ukiah High School, which is 150 miles northwest of Sacramento, Calif., has joined in on recent advocacy, accompanying Green and other superintendents to meetings with senators and representatives.
Gower said he’s seen friends from his town travel three hours round-trip each day to schools in the nearest city, Santa Rosa, rather than stick with sub-par offerings closer to their homes.
By failing to adequately fund rural schools, “You are decreasing the amount of opportunities you are giving the students,” Gower said.
Leaving the program to be reauthorized every few years also risks turbulence that can wreak havoc on school budgets. About a decade ago, Congress failed to reauthorize the bill in time.
As a result, the Trinity Alps district deferred planned building maintenance to cut costs. Within two years, two school buildings where the district had put off needed maintenance had toxic mold and leaky roofs.
If Green knew going forward that the federal funding wouldn’t dry up, “I could go to my union and negotiate better wages for them.” Budgets for maintenance and transportation could be larger, he added.
Green has been grateful for what he sees as genuine enthusiasm and empathy from federal lawmakers. He’s advocating particularly hard on behalf of district leaders who are newer to their roles and aren’t as familiar with the importance of vigorous advocacy for the federal law.
The hope is that those efforts will succeed soon. For now, though, the bill is “not going anywhere,” he said. “So it’s kind of scary.”
