Federal payments to rural schools that lapsed more than a year ago are on track to resume—but they’d only be guaranteed through 2026, and they may come too late for some schools to reverse cuts they made during the delay.
The U.S. House on Dec. 9 approved the Secure Rural Schools Act of 2025 and sent it to President Donald Trump, who’s expected to sign it soon.
The latest iteration of the program allocates roughly $250 million in annual formula funds—as well as two years of back pay—for counties to pay for road improvements and help school districts that lose revenue from being on federally owned national forest land.
The 650-student Trinity Alps district in northern California will now be able to replenish reserves, pay back debts, and cancel any layoffs that might have been necessary early next year, said Jaime Green, the district’s superintendent, who’s spent years advocating on Capitol Hill for rural education.
“It took too long,” said Green, who retired this week after eight years in the role and 30 working for public schools.
But for the moment, he’s not sweating the delay: “It doesn’t matter how long it takes if the kids are getting what they need.”
Many rural districts managed to scrape by without these dollars up until now, Green said. But some may still suffer lasting damage from the delay to a small but crucial funding stream. Some have already closed buildings, laid off staff, and delayed construction, citing the gap in federal support among other factors. Enrollment declines and other financial pressures nationwide continue to squeeze state and local budgets.
And the federal funding for schools near forest lands could lapse again in a year if Congress again moves too slowly.
The precarity of the program came as a surprise to Braeli Payne, a senior at Pima High School in Arizona, who joined her school district’s superintendent on Capitol Hill in October to advocate for extending Secure Rural Schools legislation. The continued absence of the funds would have threatened her district’s dual-credit offering at a local community college, where Braeli is already well on her way to an associate’s degree.
“This has definitely helped me not be so naive about things around me, and to understand where things come from,” Braeli said. “Not everything is given for free.”
Rural districts scrambled for a year to encourage Congress to renew the funding
Federal law dating to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt began requiring timber companies on federal lands to share a portion of their profits with local governments to support road repairs and school operations. But increasingly tight environmental restrictions in recent decades have caused those payments to dry up in many places as timber operations have shrunk and related revenues have fallen.
Lawmakers passed the Secure Rural Schools Act in 2000 to offer an alternative revenue source. But the law only guarantees funds for two years at a time, and Congress has twice failed to extend it in time to keep payments—which come from the U.S. Forest Service—flowing. The last time Congress didn’t pass a timely extension was December of last year.
The Senate in June voted to approve the reauthorization. But the House dropped it at the last minute from legislative packages several times, including as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Congress approved in July.
District leaders and advocates scrambled all year to keep the funding on lawmakers’ radars.
Finally, the legislation passed the House this week in a 399-5 vote.
“We came together as rural communities, we voiced our concerns and opinions, and I felt like we were heard,” said Braeli from Arizona.
In the absence of the Secure Rural Schools option, counties had to revert to collecting their share of timber companies’ local profits. But in some cases, that meant taking a huge loss.
In Oregon, for instance, timber revenue in six counties amounted to less than 10 percent of what they would have received from Secure Rural Schools, according to an Education Week analysis of federal data published by Oregon Public Broadcasting. Fifteen more counties saw at least a 50 percent drop.
In Washington state’s Skamania County, national forests make up 80 percent of the land, and non-taxable state and local government property makes up the vast majority of the remainder, leaving schools with little property tax revenue to tap. The lapse in Secure Rural Schools funding cost the county $830,000.
This fall, the Stevenson-Carson district there cited the Secure Rural Schools funding as it shuttered its only middle school. Close to 50 6th graders moved to the local elementary school and more than 100 7th and 8th graders shifted to the nearby high school. Ten staff members lost their jobs.
Federal funding concerns remain as Congress debates appropriations
While they’re buoyed by the renewal of Secure Rural Schools funding, rural school leaders are still wary about broader prospects for federal funding.
Trump has proposed eliminating the Education Department’s Rural Education Achievement Program grants and consolidating a portion of their $220 million annual funding into a K-12 block grant for states to spend as they please. Republican House lawmakers more recently have advanced an appropriations package that preserves REAP but slashes 25 percent from the $18 billion Title I program for low-income students on which districts in all geographies depend.
The protracted federal shutdown this fall delayed critical Impact Aid payments to hundreds of school districts that intersect with federal property, many in rural communities.
And federal capacity to manage congressionally mandated programs is also in doubt. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, where Secure Rural Schools is housed, has considerably reduced staffing this year through layoffs and proposed reorganizations.
Meanwhile, Education Department staffers who work on programs for rural schools were among those who received layoff notices in October. Congress in November restored those jobs at least through late January. But the administration has since announced it’s shifting those programs to the Department of Labor—a move 20 states have already challenged in court.
Rural school districts are also facing increasing pressure from lawmakers in some states to consolidate, merge, or even close altogether. Research shows school closures aren’t guaranteed to save money—and they can be devastating to communities where schools are among their largest employers and most prominent community hubs. There can also be academic consequences for students when their schools close.
And Secure Rural Schools’ long-term fate isn’t assured. Some lawmakers want to extend it for a longer period next time around. Others say the federal government should instead do more to encourage timber harvesting and, as a result, timber revenues that can flow to schools.
Either way, if Secure Rural Schools funding lapses again, the rural counties that depend on it won’t have access to the limited, alternative revenue they’ve traditionally been able to collect when that happens: Congress earlier this year passed legislation that redirects most of timber company revenue from operations in national forests to the federal government, instead of county coffers.
In the meantime, Green is relieved that his district didn’t make panicked cuts, he said: “Once you lay people off in education, they often don’t come back.”
