Glen Szymoniak and a group of Klamath County students were excited this fall to get an invitation to meet with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson at the Capitol in Washington D.C.
Szymoniak, superintendent of the Klamath County School District in southern Oregon, said he was told the Oct. 20 meeting would be a celebration of sorts. His district has been waiting for more than a year for crucial federal funding it has counted on for a quarter century.
Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives signaled this fall they were ready to announce that they were moving forward on a vote to renew the 25-year-old law that provided tens of millions each year for rural schools and communities in Oregon that previously benefited from timber revenue.
Twice since December of last year, the U.S. Senate has voted to renew the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, in an effort led by Oregon’s senior U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat and co-author of the original 2000 law, along with Idaho’s senior U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican.
But each time the Senate has approved it, the House fails to take a vote. The bill lapsed in 2023 and counties haven’t gotten payments since early 2024. House Republicans most recently failed to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act in the tax and spending cut megalaw they passed in July.
Sadly for Szymoniak and the students, the government shut down for a record 43 days in October, and Johnson, R-Louisiana, cancelled their meeting. Szymoniak said he hasn’t heard anything since about the future of Secure Rural Schools.
Neither have Wyden or Crapo, who on Thursday — with just two weeks before the House wraps its work for the year — sent a letter to Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, urging them to take a vote on the act before they recess.
It’s the third time since late 2024 that Wyden and Crapo have pressed House leaders to take a vote. This time a group of 83 bipartisan lawmakers from the Senate and the House joined the two, writing that the vote was necessary, “to uphold the federal government’s responsibility to communities impacted by federal land ownership.”
Compensation for critical services
Klamath County School District is one of many rural school districts across the country that has depended on money from the Secure Rural Schools Act, which has distributed billions over the decades in funding for schools, roads and other public services and infrastructure to counties in Oregon, 40 other states and Puerto Rico that have large swaths of federal land within their borders.
The federal dollars help to cover costs that counties incur when providing critical services to people and industries using those federal lands for activities that generate revenue for the federal government — such as animal grazing and timber production.
The federal government manages more than half of Oregon’s land, and the state has experienced the biggest loss of any state since the Secure Rural Schools act has gone unrenewed.
Since it lapsed in 2023, Oregon has lost out on more than $48.6 million in federal money for rural roads, public services and schools, according to a September report from the D.C.-based Center for American Progress, a liberal public policy and think tank.
And the Klamath County School District has received the most funding from the act among the state’s school districts — between $800,000 and $1 million each year. Szymoniak has told the Capital Chronicle the money is crucial for investments that the school needs to make in infrastructure and “investing in the future.”
Oregon Capital Chronicle
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