Congress approved critical funding for rural schools Tuesday night with the Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act.
More than $12 million is set aside for Alaskan communities affected by the decline of the timber industry. That money goes to districts with large amounts of untaxed federal land, and is distributed in annual payments to rural boroughs and school districts — including those near the Tongass National Forest in Southeast and the Chugach near Prince William Sound.
“We had a big success,” said Rep. Jeremy Bynum (R-Ketchikan). “The legislature spoke with a unified voice that Secure Rural Schools needed to be reauthorized.”
Bynum sponsored a resolution earlier this year to renew and permanently reinstate the program. He said when the funding lapsed the past two years, those smaller rural communities felt the impact.
“We absolutely noticed that not having that funding available put an immediate pressure on, how do we backfill that funding?” he said.
In Ketchikan, the annual payments go to the borough and typically end up being between $1 million to $1.5 million. In smaller communities, like Wrangell, those payments end up being a big portion of their school budget.
The Secure Rural Schools Act initially passed in 2000 in response to the decline of the timber industry. But that funding lapsed at the end of the 2023 fiscal year. With overwhelming bipartisan support, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to reauthorize that program through September of 2026, including two years worth of back-pay.
Bynum says he knows this reauthorization isn’t a permanent fix, and that it will take work to find other ways to fill that gap and be less reliant on Secure Rural Schools funds.
“What I don’t want to have happen is I don’t want to end up in a situation where we let it lapse again, and then we’re really kind of scrambling to figure out how to effectively do the backfill for for our school funding,” he said.
Bynum says there has been discussion of filling that financial gap with longer-term logging contracts, but he doesn’t believe that will be close to enough. He says those logging contracts aren’t long enough to see forest industries revitalized.
The federal payment amounts are decided by how much money each community would have made in the height of the logging industry.
For rural municipalities that have counted on this funding for over 20 years, losing it has been a big financial blow.
In Ketchikan, Secure Rural Schools money goes directly into the Local Education Fund, a borough-managed account that funds schools and is primarily paid for with property taxes. There’s a $2 million floor for the Local Education Fund that, without a supermajority vote from the assembly, the borough’s required to stay above.
Charlanne Thomas, the finance director for the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, said that without the Secure Rural Schools money, the account went below the $2 million floor.
She says without those payments, they might have to pull from the borough’s general fund.
“So if we end up in a shortage in the Local Education Fund, it could result in property taxes being raised to make up the difference or supplementing it from the general fund, which could affect the sales tax needing to be increased,” Thomas said. “So it kind of has a domino effect. If one is shorted, it would definitely affect the other fund.”
The Secure Rural Schools Reauthorization Act now heads to the president’s desk. It is unclear when that will happen. Once it is signed into law, payments are expected to be distributed within 45 days.