Rural schools, like the one Andy’s children attend, receive little money from the Secure Rural Schools Act. Photo courtesy Andy Stahl
The Bush administration wants to auction off 300,000 acres of national forests to pay for education in rural schools—or so it says. According to Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, “There are county government executives who would benefit from the revenue that would be generated to support their schools.”
As a rural school board member, I know the financial struggles schools face. My district serves about 320 students—kindergarten through high school—at a total cost of $2.5 million per year. That works out to about $7,700 per student—well below the national average. Our infrastructure is old—crumbling, in fact. Our high school roof leaks. The grade school my son and daughter attend was built in the early 1920s, with too many idiosyncracies to list.
As a board member, I know there’s no fat left to cut. We balance our budgets by eliminating advanced placement courses, foreign languages, music, art, sports and physical education. So if George W. Bush says that he can raise money for my school district by selling off national forests, I’m at least going to take a look. Here’s what I learned.
Bush’s sell-off is intended to finance five more years of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, which since 2000 has granted money to states with national forests. The money is intended to compensate counties and schools for foregone tax revenue because federal agencies like the Forest Service are exempt from paying local property taxes on public land.
I wondered, “How much revenue could be raised from national forests if Uncle Sam paid the commercial timberland property tax rate?” Not much, it turns out. Oregon’s annual property tax rate on its best commercial timberland is $3.40 per acre. Lane County, where I live, includes 1,565,162 acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land (including hundreds of thousands of acres with no trees at all). So Lane County would collect about $5 million, at most, if those lands were privately owned. But for the past six years under the Secure Rural Schools Act, Lane County has been paid about $50 million a year—roughly ten times the equivalent property tax amount. Why? The Secure Rural Schools formula is based on logging revenues during the boom years of the 1980s, not on property tax rates of equivalent private land. Oregon led the nation in national forest logging during that time, so Oregon counties have been getting more than half of all the money paid out under the Secure Rural Schools act.
How much of that money ends up in rural schools? In Oregon, schools get only 25 percent of these federal dollars—the balance goes to fill potholes in county roads. But our state distributes the money to all districts on a per pupil basis. Since most students attend suburban or urban schools, rural schools receive little. In my own school district, only 1.5 percent of our total budget (about $35,000) comes from the Secure Rural Schools Act.
Whatever the Bush administration’s real motive for selling national forests, it isn’t to support Oregon’s rural schools. That’s too bad—we could sure use some help.