Hundreds of rural school districts nationwide will soon have to ponder laying off employees, cutting programs, and raising local taxes after Congress missed the end-of-2024 deadline to renew a key stream of federal funding.
For most of the last 25 years, the Secure Rural Schools Act has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars to counties where a large share of land consists of federally owned forests. Counties send a big chunk of that money to school districts for everything from paying teachers to replacing HVAC systems. Counties also get to spend some of the funds on vital public services like emergency management and road maintenance.
The most recent round of payments went out last April. Rural school advocates since then have implored lawmakers to keep the program alive, and the Senate voted to do so in November. But the House failed to take it up before Congress wrapped up its session and went home for the holidays.
As a result, district leaders and government officials across rural America spent winter break knowing they might soon have to rejigger their budgets, figuring out which expenses to slash—and whom to lay off.
“If the [speaker of the House] considers educating children and having safe roads in rural counties a waste of taxpayer dollars, he is wrong,” said Jaime Green, superintendent of the Trinity Alps district of 650 students in northern California. “We have to take $600,000 of education resources, including employees, away from our children next year.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson hasn’t said why he didn’t bring the legislation up for a vote. The bill’s primary champions in Congress—Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho—have said they plan to re-introduce it this year.
“Senator Crapo will advocate for its passage from day one,” Melanie Lawhorn, Crapo’s spokesperson, wrote in an email.
But even if the legislation passes in the new Congress, payments likely would arrive late, scrambling budgets for next school year that were crafted months earlier, said Hank Stern, a spokesperson for Wyden.
“Even without a missed or delayed payment, the lapse has already likely affected school and county budgeting,” Stern wrote in an email. “It’s not like rural districts can just hire a teacher midyear with money they weren’t guaranteed to receive.”
The blow to federal funding for rural schools comes just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House with broader plans to slash federal spending and reassign the federal government’s current education responsibilities to states and local governments.
Trump hasn’t weighed in on the Secure Rural Schools Act, which typically has widespread bipartisan political support. The program also isn’t mentioned in Project 2025, the 900-page conservative policy document written in large part by members of Trump’s former and incoming administrations and other Trump allies.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s presidential transition team, shared a statement with Education Week affirming that the incoming president plans to “ensure all families have access to a great education, no matter their zip code.”
She didn’t answer directly whether Trump supports the Secure Rural Schools program.
Federal support for schools near national forests is a century-old tradition
The federal government owns 193 million acres of forest land—more than 8 percent of the entire nation’s acreage—across 745 counties in 41 states and Puerto Rico. Roughly 4,400 of the nation’s 13,000 public school districts have some federal forest land within their boundaries.
At the start of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration established the nation’s system of national parks and forests. Since then, federal law has required timber companies to share a quarter of the revenue they generated from that land with local governments, in an effort to make up for the fact that those governments can’t collect property taxes from the federal government.
Timber revenue has since dried up. Lawmakers in 2000 approved the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act to help counties and school districts recover those losses, just as the federal government’s much-older Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program supplements local revenue for any land owned by the federal government.
But Secure Rural Schools legislation has never covered more than two years at a time, and overall funding has declined rather than grown with inflation.
Supporters of Secure Rural Schools had reason for optimism in recent months. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in November to extend the legislation for two more years.
But Johnson, the House speaker, didn’t bring up similar legislation for a vote. And he didn’t include it in the stopgap spending package the House passed on Dec. 20 to narrowly avert another government shutdown before Congress’ 2023 term ended.
It’s not clear whether House leaders plan to prioritize the legislation as the new session begins, or at all. A spokesperson for Johnson didn’t answer multiple requests for comment in time for publication.
Fewer funds for roads mean more safety concerns for students
Without Secure Rural Schools funds, the Trinity Alps district will have to cut more than 5 percent of its annual operating budget. Layoffs are inevitable, said Green.
That will be the case in many districts, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. But the policy’s expiration will affect schools in less obvious ways, too.
Close to 90 percent of the land in Idaho’s Valley County is owned by the U.S. Forest Service. The area is a major tourist destination, with abundant hiking and skiing.
But keeping the place livable for its 12,000 residents is no easy feat. The county receives more than 8 feet of snowfall every year, and winter weather blankets the region for close to half the year. That leaves five months to fill potholes and keep roads passable so children can get to and from school, said Sherry Maupin, a member of the Valley County Commission since 2019 and a resident since 2006.
Much of the funding for that road work comes from the Secure Rural Schools Act, Maupin said. Without those dollars, the county instead will have to ask residents to approve a sharp increase in property tax rates.
“Really this is a tax shift from the federal level,” Maupin said. “That’s where that responsibility should be, but instead it goes back to our local taxpayers.”
Local tax hikes could also be on the menu 120 miles north, in Idaho’s Mountain View school district. The 1,100-student district regularly asks voters to approve a supplemental levy that covers roughly $3 million of the district’s annual operating budget of $14 million.
In the past, when voters approved the levy, the district would stash Secure Rural Schools funds for emergencies. But from 2020 to 2023, a majority of voters rejected the levy request four times in a row. Instead of going into savings, more than $1 million in Secure Rural Schools funds had to help cover the costs that levy would have paid for, said Alica Holthaus, the district’s interim superintendent.
The district’s board of trustees responded by cutting, among other things, transportation for student-athletes. That move saved $80,000—money the district will sorely need on hand when Secure Rural Schools funding disappears.
But Holthaus said she doesn’t have the heart to keep depriving student-athletes of a free bus to sporting events. Voters this year approved a two-year levy, so she restored that service, and is hoping for a miracle that will keep Secure Rural Schools dollars flowing.
“I think that some parents were putting their high school kids in a car and saying drive to this game in the dark. That made me too nervous,” Holthaus said. “In my opinion, every single child in the district is worth $80,000.”
Rural schools’ problems are piling up
Rural school districts in recent years have faced acute challenges with enrollment losses, labor shortages, and dwindling resources.
Even so, Congress’ support for Secure Rural Schools has shrunk significantly over time. In the early years, lawmakers allocated as much as $500 million a year. The most recent reauthorization allocated roughly half that amount.
This isn’t the first time the law has expired. Payments lapsed in fiscal year 2016, then resumed in 2017 after Congress eventually reauthorized the program.
For Maupin, the precarity of the Secure Rural Schools Act underscores her persistent frustration that Idaho and other Western states consistently rank among those that spend the least per student on public schools.
In her view, Idaho has unique fiscal constraints—more than 60 percent of its land is federally owned, a share that’s exceeded only in Utah and Nevada.
“We’re [nearly two-thirds] federally owned with no income, no taxes,” Maupin said. “If people truly want to put money behind education in these states that are so highly federally regulated, where’s the offset to that?”
