Hailey Branson-Potts reported yesterday in the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "These rural schools face a financial ‘cliff.’ Will partisan bickering cut off a lifeline?" The dateline is Washington, DC, where far northern California school administrators traveled to lobby for federal funds under the threatened Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act. Here's a bit of the backstory on that Act, which has been funded only on a temporary basis since its inception in 2000:
Brianna Gallegos, the U.S. Forest Service program manager for Secure Rural Schools, said the program “is so politically driven.” Her agency is the funnel for the school money, but “we just have to wait for Congress to decide ... to reauthorize, extend deadlines, to add new things,” she said.
The amount at stake is what lawmakers call “budget dust” in a federal budget that is trillions of dollars. Last year, the Secure Rural Schools program gave $238 million to 742 counties in 41 states and Puerto Rico.Calls for permanent funding abound. From Republicans and Democrats. From environmentalists and the timber industry.
A solution inevitably falls victim to partisan bickering. Liberals don’t want to cut down trees. Conservatives want to slash spending.
Just as interesting are the depictions of the places from whence these educators traveled, most in Trinity County, California, population 16,112.
Branson-Potts introduces us to Anmarie Swanstrom, principal for the Mountain Valley Unified School District in Hayfork, enrollment 340.
Swanstrom’s district will lose a significant chunk of its budget if Congress does not renew the Secure Rural Schools Act, a long-standing program for schools in forested counties, by this fall. She would have to lay people off.
In Hayfork — a boom-and-bust town of 2,300 where timber crashed and legal marijuana is now doing the same — students have little access to medical care. Mental health support comes through the schools, which are also evacuation centers when the mountains burn.
“We serve as the heart of the town, and if the schools go, the town will go completely,” Swanstrom said.
People in California’s rural northern reaches, where a conservative spirit reigns in opposition to the state’s famously liberal ethos, often feel forgotten in the halls of power in Sacramento and Washington.
Their towns are shrinking. Their forests are burning. And for their schools, a financial cliff could be coming.
Swanstrom and three other rural Northern California superintendents went to Washington this month to look their legislators in the eye and tell them just how desperate they are.
With the latest version of the Secure Rural Schools funding set to expire in October, the school administrators decided they could not "sit idly by. A little budget dust goes a long way in a small town."
Another interesting aspect of the story is just how hard it was for these administrators/educators to get the ear of their U.S. Congressman and Senators:
In Washington, the superintendents’ first scheduled meeting was with staffers for Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon whose state gets the most money through the program.
Two hours beforehand, a staffer emailed Green: There were some scheduling issues. Couldn’t they meet virtually?
Green was crestfallen. They had traveled all this way. They’d been rescheduled repeatedly.
He had printed a short proposal asking Congress to consider several options for permanently funding the program, including selective logging or putting green energy sources like windmills or solar farms on federal land.
He just wanted to hand it to a real human being.
“It’s always a no if you don’t ask,” Sheree Beans, his district’s director of business services, reassured him.
* * *
On the second day of their trip, the superintendents squeezed into the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael). He gave them half an hour.
A Times reporter was not allowed inside. In a later phone interview, Huffman said Secure Rural Schools has “become a political football,” continually pushed to the brink before being reauthorized.
Rural schools, he said, “have kind of been used as a prop for folks with a different agenda, folks who want to roll back environmental protections, who want to do mandatory logging quotas in national forests.”
* * *
“I’d like to see the federal government just embrace this as an ongoing financial responsibility,” he said.
Are there such proposals in Congress?
“Not good ones,” Huffman said.
After meeting Huffman, the superintendents raced across Capitol Hill to the office of California Sen. Alex Padilla.
In Padilla’s front office, Green commented that their pitch should be a slam dunk because it involved kids’ education. But they weren’t the only ones with a sympathetic cause. Another group was there to discuss children’s hospitals.
The senator gave the superintendents about 90 seconds to snap a photo. A staffer listened for four minutes.
Outside, Swanstrom said that even a short interaction goes a long way.
“I think it’s important that they see our faces,” she said. “We’re caught in the crosshairs here. We need to change the narrative. We need to make this about supporting rural schools, separate from timber. If we don’t do that, we’re never going to get funding that’s equitable.”
On their final day in Washington, the superintendents scored a few minutes with one of Wyden’s staff members.
Then, Rep. Doug LaMalfa, chairman of the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Forestry, ushered them into his office, where shelves displayed a book titled “Woke, Inc.” and a collection of Rush Limbaugh on-air commentaries. The Republican from Richvale in Butte County gave them an hour of his time.
The conversation quickly turned to the heated debate over whether to increase logging in national forests, which LaMalfa supports.
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