In February 2023, Jaime Green, the superintendent of a tiny school district in the mountains of Northern California, flew to Washington, D.C., with an urgent appeal.
The Secure Rural Schools Act, a longstanding financial aid program for schools like his in forested counties, was about to lapse, putting thousands of districts at risk of losing significant chunks of their budgets. The law had originated 25 years ago as a temporary fix for rural counties that were losing tax revenue from reduced timber harvesting on public lands.
Green, whose Trinity Alps Unified School District serves about 650 students in the struggling logging town of Weaverville, bounded through Capitol Hill with a small group of Northern California educators, pleading with anyone who would listen: Please renew the program.
They were assured, over and over, that it had bipartisan support, wasn’t much money in the grand scheme of things, and almost certainly would be renewed.
But because Congress could not agree upon how to fund the program, it took nearly three years — and a lapse in funding — for the Secure Rural Schools Act to be revived, at least temporarily.
On Tuesday, the U.S. House overwhelmingly voted to extend the program through 2027 and to provide retroactive payments to districts that lost funding while it was lapsed.
The vote was 399 to 5, with all nay votes cast by Republicans. The bill, approved unanimously by the Senate in June, now awaits President Trump’s signature.
“We’ve got Republicans and Democrats holding hands, passing this freaking bill, finally,” Green said. “We stayed positive. The option to quit was, what, layofffs and kids not getting educated? We kept telling them the same story, and they kept listening.”
Green, who until that 2023 trip had never traveled east of Texas, wound up flying to Washington 14 times. He was in the House audience Tuesday as the bill was passed.
In an interview Tuesday, Republican Rep. Doug LaMalfa, who represents a vast swath of Northern California and helped lead the push for reauthorization, said Congress never should have let the program lapse in the first place.
The Secure Rural Schools Act, he said, was a victim of a Congress in which “it’s still an eternal fight over anything fiscal.” It is “annoying,” LaMalfa said, “how hard it is to get basic things done around here.”
“I’m not proud of the situation taking this long and putting these folks in this much stress,” he said of rural communities that rely upon the funding. “I’m not going to break my arm patting myself on the back.”
Despite broad bipartisan support, the Secure Rural Schools Act, run by the U.S. Forest Service, expired in the fall of 2023, with final payouts made in 2024. That year, the program distributed more than $232 million to more than 700 counties across the United States and Puerto Rico, with nearly $34 million going to California.
In 2024, reauthorization stalled in the House. This year, it was included in a House draft of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act but was ultimately dropped from the final package.
While public school budgets are largely supported by local property taxes, districts surrounded by untaxed federal forest land have depended upon modest payments from the U.S. Forest Service to stay afloat.
Historically, that money mostly came from logging. Under a 1908 law, counties with national forests — primarily in the rural West — received 25% of what the federal government made from timber sales off that land. The money was split between schools, roads and other critical services.
But by the early 1990s, the once-thriving logging industry cratered. So did the school funding.
In 2000, Congress enacted what was supposed to be a short-term, six-year solution: the Secure Rural Schools & Community Self-Determination Act, with funding based on a complex formula involving historical timber revenues and other factors.
Congress never made the program permanent, instead reauthorizing versions of it by tucking it into other bills. Once, it was included in a bill to shore up the nation’s helium supply. Another time, it was funded in part by a tax on roll-your-own-cigarette machines.
The program extension passed Tuesday was a standalone bill.
“For rural school districts, it’s critically important, and it means stability from a financial perspective,” said Yuri Calderon, executive director of the Sacramento-based Small School Districts’ Assn.
Calderon said he had heard from numerous school districts across the state that had been dipping into reserve funds to avoid layoffs and cutbacks since the Secure Rural Schools Act expired.
Calderon said the program wasn’t “a handout; it’s basically a mitigation payment” from the federal government, which owns and manages about 45% of California’s land.
On Dec. 3, LaMalfa and Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, alongside Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo and Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, spearheaded a letter with signatures from more than 80 bipartisan members of Congress urging House leadership to renew the program by the end of the year.
The letter said the lapse in funding already had led to “school closures, delayed road and bridge maintenance, and reduced public safety services.”
In Trinity County, where Green’s district is located, the federal government owns more than 75% of the land, limiting the tax base and the ability to pass local bonds for things like campus maintenance.
As the Secure Rural Schools Act has been tweaked over the years, funding has seesawed. In 2004, Green’s district in Weaverville, population 3,200, received $1.3 million through the program.
The last payment was around $600,000, about 4% of the district’s budget, said Sheree Beans, the district’s chief budget official.
Beans said Monday that, had the program not been renewed, the district likely would have had to lay off seven or eight staff members.
“I don’t want to lay off anyone in my small town,” Beans said. “I see them at the post office. It affects kids. It affects their education.”
In October — during the 43-day federal government shutdown — Beans took three Trinity County students who are members of Future Farmers of America to Capitol Hill to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson’s staff about the program.
After years of back and forth, Green could not go on that trip. He did not feel well. His doctor told him he needed to stop traveling so much.
Before hopping on a flight to Washington this weekend, the 59-year-old superintendent penned a letter to his staff. After three decades in the district, he was retiring, effective Monday.
Green wrote that he has a rare genetic condition called neurofibromatosis type 2, which has caused tumors to grow on his spinal cord. He soon will be undergoing surgeries to have them removed.
“My body has let me go as far as I can,” he wrote.
In Green’s letter, he wrote that, if the Secure Rural Schools Act was extended, “financially we will be alright for years to come.”
On Monday night, the district’s Board of Trustees named Beans interim superintendent. She attended the meeting, then drove more than three hours to the airport in Sacramento. She got on a red-eye flight and made it to Washington in time for the Secure Rural Schools vote on the House floor.
When Green decided a few weeks ago to step down, he did not know the reauthorization vote would coincide with his first day of retirement.
But, he said, he never doubted the program would eventually be revived. Coming right before Christmas, he said, “the timing is beautiful.”
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