Cuts in Logging Chop U.S. Funds for Rural Schools

The Bear Valley School in Alpine County north of Yosemite National Park isn’t supposed to be a one-room schoolhouse, but with seven students and one teacher left, it might as well be.

It’s not the only country school in trouble.

Surrounded by national forest and dependent for nearly 100 years on timber revenue, Alpine County and many similarly situated school districts throughout rural America have become unintended casualties of a revolution in forest policies and practices.

As logging in national forests has been dramatically curtailed over the last decade, related federal payments to counties have fallen nearly 40%. Rural school district officials in several states say they’ve had to lay off teachers and counselors, suspend music and art programs and do away with most extracurricular activities. In eastern Oregon, officials in at least one county have gone to four-day school weeks.

The historic dependence of rural school districts on logging revenue from national forests has created a significant impediment to forestry reforms aimed at protecting the last old-growth trees and disappearing wildlife.

The Clinton administration has proposed in its budget for the next fiscal year to bail out the schools. In the process, the administration has vowed to end the linkage between school funds and timber cuts.

“There is no reason the richest nation on earth should be funding the education of rural kids at the expense of our national forests,” said a spokesman for U.S. Forest Service chief Michael Dombeck.

“We’re simply not going to turn the clock back and allow levels of timber harvesting that the forests can’t sustain.”

But a political alliance between rural officials and the timber industry is fighting any attempt to change the way the schools receive their funds. They fear that a federal program that simply sends money to the schools would further reduce the government’s incentive to promote logging.

Under a 1908 law, counties with national forest land receive 25% of the money that the federal government gets from the timber companies that operate in those forests. Today, counties in about 40 states get logging payments, which they split between school and road budgets. Both are declining as a result of diminishing timber harvests.

Thirty-nine of California’s 58 counties receive the school funds. Until 2003, some schools will also receive supplemental funds directed to areas where logging was curtailed because of the need to protect the endangered northern spotted owl. According to the state’s Department of Forestry, the schools hardest hit by the logging slowdown are those in thinly populated counties, such as Alpine, whose tax bases are too small to make up for the loss of timber revenue.

More than 90% of Alpine County’s land is in government ownership and exempt from property taxes, according to Supt. of Schools James Parsons.

With the drop in forest receipts, Parsons said, the school district has lost a quarter of its budget.

“We’ve had to eliminate our athletic program and two-thirds of our busing,” Parsons said. “We don’t have a full-time maintenance crew anymore, and we’ve had to borrow a school nurse from another district.”

“Families have moved out so they could put their kids in better schools.”

School a Community Hub

Parsons said that if supplementary funds aren’t found, at least one of the five schools in the district may be closed.

The kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Bear Valley School is in greatest danger. With its one teacher, one aide and a bus driver who fills in as maintenance man, the school has lost 80% of its enrollment over the last five years.

Education isn’t all that suffers when rural schools are shuttered.

“In some of the more far-flung mountain communities, where you haven’t got much more than a gas station and a general store, the schoolhouse is the hub, the one place that provides a sense of community,” said Marvin Locke, a former Tehama County school superintendent who recently helped organize the Forest Counties School Coalition to lobby for increased financial aid from the federal government.

Counties have been receiving logging payments since 1908 as compensation for the loss of millions of acres of taxable land that was incorporated into America’s fledgling national forest system.

Most of the counties that receive the funds today are rural, but even the Los Angeles Unified School District, which borders national forest land, gets a bit of the money--about $14,000 a year.

During peak logging years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, total per-pupil spending in some of California’s heavily forested counties was up to 200% higher than it was in Los Angeles, said William Stewart, an economist with the Department of Forestry.

The sharp decline in logging and payments follows unprecedented efforts to protect spotted owls and other endangered species and has pitted rural educators against environmentalists.

There are other reasons for the downturn in logging besides enforcement of environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act. Foreign competition has flooded the U.S. market with cheap timber and past over-cutting has cleared out the biggest, most valuable trees from some forests.

Nonetheless, saving the schools has become the latest battle cry of forest communities and timber interests, which charge that environmentalists are putting the welfare of trees and birds ahead of the needs of rural people.

“I call it ecological imperialism,” said retired north Florida forester W. V. McConnell. Logging restrictions in the Apalachicola National Forest on behalf of the red-cockaded woodpecker have forced surrounding Liberty County schools to drop their industrial arts curriculum in a region where most students don’t go to college, he says.

In north-central Pennsylvania, a number of school districts have raised $30,000 in legal fees to fight conservation groups trying to restrict the logging of black cherry trees in the Allegheny National Forest.

Despite a 70% decline in logging in national forests, the industry still generates $2 billion for local economies, according to the Independent Forest Products Assn., a trade group that represents family-owned sawmills.

Many of the affected school districts have come out against a proposed bailout by the Clinton administration that would guarantee a high level of funding in perpetuity but would appropriate the money from a new source. The plan would sever the connection between logging in national forests and county school and road budgets.

“Sure the federal government can come up with a new entitlement program. But the less impetus there is to sell timber from the national forests, the more it’s going to hurt the economies of rural counties,” said Frank Gladics, president of the Independent Forest Products Assn.

There are close ties between many school officials and friends and neighbors who work in the woods, and there is the shared view--contested by environmentalists--that frequent logging helps protect against fire and blight.

Former Tehama County school superintendent Locke owns forest property and says that the logging slowdown on a neighboring national forest has had an impact on his land.

“We’re having to take out more dead trees every year because of a spreading pine beetle infestation,” Locke said. In past years, he said, frequent logging of the federal forest arrested the spread of blight.

Seeking a New Source

The Clinton administration has not yet identified an alternative source for the school and road money.

If the administration decided to continue funding schools directly from Forest Service receipts, rather than general tax funds, the only potential source of revenue would be recreation, and that too is problematic.

A pilot program that imposes a new user fee on hikers, picnickers and others has encountered a buzz saw of opposition. Moreover, there is concern that commercial recreation--from ski resorts to off-road vehicle franchises--could be as destructive to national forests as logging.

Still, there is strong support for the administration’s effort to end school districts’ dependence on logging.

“I am appalled that part of the school budget comes from cutting down trees,” said Patty Brissenden, an Alpine County resort owner with children in the county schools.

“Even if you don’t care about the environment as I do, you can’t deny that timber is a very unstable source of funding. It’s subject to market cycles that make it impossible to plan for future needs,” Brissenden said.

On the West Coast, some of the harshest criticism of the present system comes from the fishing industry, which blames a steep decline in salmon on logging in national forests. Fishermen, along with many wildlife experts, contend that erosion aggravated by logging has destroyed salmon spawning grounds in most coastal streams.

“More logging revenue means more fish going extinct and more fishermen losing their jobs,” said Glen Spain, northwest regional director of the 4,000-member Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns.

While officials debate what to do about the school funding crisis, civic groups pitch in to save school athletic programs in some counties, and some state legislatures provide stopgap funding.

And James Parsons and other school superintendents scramble to keep schools like Bear Valley open.

“We’re year-to-year up here,” Parsons said.

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Cutting Funding

As logging in national forests has been reduced in the past 10 years, timber companies’ payments to the federal government, some of which are passed along to counties, have also fallen. The experience of Alpine County is typical.

Source: U.S. Forest Service; Tehama County Department of Education