Rural schools get stopgap funding

Schools in rural counties got another reprieve May 25, when President Bush signed emergency war funding legislation that included a one-year extension of federal subsidies for schools, roads, libraries and other crucial public services at current funding levels.

Advocates in California, Oregon and other states with large federal forest preserves were disappointed that the bill did not reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act for an additional six years, as they had hoped. But the stopgap funding measure, the second passed by Congress to extend the program in the past two years, does forestall layoffs and service cuts in school districts that are dependent on these federal rural communities subsidies.

Tehama County Department of Education Superintendent Bob Douglas, president of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, said congressional leaders “do not understand the chaos that a series of a one-year appropriations” creates for rural school districts and counties. “We desperately need a multiyear reauthorization,” Douglas stressed.

The main focus of the emergency spending bill was to provide $100 million for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But funding for a number of relatively small domestic programs, including the rural schools act, was included in the legislation.

Last year the act provided more than $66 million that helped support services in 4,400 schools and 39 California counties. Communities in Plumas, Sierra, Siskiyou and Tehama counties are among the largest recipients. Members of the California School Boards Association’s Federal Issues Council made reauthorization of the rural schools act a top priority when they visited lawmakers during their annual lobbying trip to Washington, D.C., in March.

Congress established the subsidies to compensate counties for logging revenues lost when the federal government placed large swaths of forest land in national preserves. The act expired last fall, and President Bush is calling for the eventual elimination of this federal subsidy by 2011. But vociferous lobbying by CSBA and other advocates for rural schools helped persuade Congress to extend the act last year. Affected schools and counties received their payments in December 2006 as scheduled and can expect their 2007 payments to be on time as well.

The California Legislature is considering Senate Joint Resolution 3, authored by Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Grass Valley, and co-sponsored by CSBA, that urges the 110th Congress to renew the rural schools act for an additional five years.