Education in Isolated Rural Communities – Nobody Really Cares

I first saw it firsthand from my view from my adopted city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a poor state where one room schoolhouses in isolated pueblos of indigenous people gave way to… exactly. There are some government-provided high schools, one in Santa Fe, where teenaged Native Americans could board far from home. Leave home? If there is space? Can’t remote learning help? But indigenous people fall within the jurisdiction of the Department of Indian Affairs, one of the oldest federal agencies in the country, which is part of the Department of the Interior. If you side-step those casino-rich reservations and pueblos, the land reserved to those real Americans offers a plethora of substandard housing, abysmal infrastructure and horrible schools offering no real hope for advancement in an educated world. You can, however, find drugs and alcohol in abundance… and sadness.

The United States generally has a bad habit of ignoring rural communities as to some of the most basic requirements to foster the American dream. This blog is about one of the biggest ways we leave rural communities behind: education. Whether you are talking about Jackson, Mississippi effectively a “rural level” city where well-off locals left a while ago, leaving behind an impoverished African American (80%) community with almost no local tax base and a state legislature, mostly of older White men, exceptionally hostile to reallocating resources to assist this city… which also happens to be the state capital. Jackson has all the demographic hallmarks of a small rural town.

But generally, we aren’t particularly willing to help truly isolated rural communities even among local impoverished White communities. If you have noticed a rising anger in rural America, often a White evangelical heartland believing they are being “replaced” and “left behind,” you might also be aware that their public schools are competing with inner-city schools in large urban centers for who provides the least valuable, modern education. 

If Republican priorities continue to focus on cutting budgets, particularly for what they pejoratively label as “entitlements,” you are also undoubtedly aware that our nation’s public schools have often been the target of that malign red-vision austerity. It is a false savings, since badly educated children are not only unlikely to earn more and pay greater taxes, they are also the ones to place the greatest burdens on our social and criminal justice systems. But as my recent Trump/MAGA’s Worst Enemy – Educated Voters blog illustrates rather clearly, the higher a voter’s educational level, the less likely they are to support GOP policies and candidates. Hmmm? 

Some of our most isolated communities lie in thick forest lands, often with an exceptionally low tax base and significantly higher unemployment. This emblematic poverty of such areas has long since drawn the attention of Congress. Subject to sporadic bouts of austerity, schools in such areas have depended on congressional public schools funding under the Secure Rural Schools Act, a long-standing program for schools in forested counties. This program is up for Congressional review as part of the federal budget. However, as you may have also noticed, a very conservative faction of the Republican Party, which gave Kevin McCarthy enough votes to become Speaker of the House, is demanding massive budgetary cutbacks as a condition to approving the needed increase in the federal debt ceiling to pay for programs already authorized by Congress.

If those federal budgetary funds are not approved for such rural schools, the fall term just might collapse or at least proceed with huge classrooms and abysmal operating conditions. Writing for the February 26th Los Angeles Times, Haily Branson-Potts explains the genesis and operation of that federal program: “For more than a century, schools like Swanstrom’s, surrounded by national forest land that cannot be taxed have depended upon modest payments through the U.S. Forest Service to stay afloat.

“That money has come primarily from logging. Under a 1908 law, counties with national forests — mostly in the rural West — received 25% of what the federal government made from timber sales off that land. The money was split between schools and roads… But by the early 1990s, the once-thriving logging industry cratered. So did the school funding.

“In 2000, Congress enacted what was supposed to be a short-term, six-year solution: the Secure Rural Schools & Community Self-Determination Act, with funding based on a complex formula involving historical timber revenues and other factors including the amount of eligible federal land in each county… Congress never made the program permanent, instead reauthorizing versions of it by tacking it onto other bills — nine times… Once, it was tucked into a bill to shore up the nation’s helium supply. At one point, it was funded in part by a tax on roll-your-own cigarette machines.

“The program ‘has served as an increasingly tattered bandage for rural communities,’ staying alive ‘through a series of stopgap extensions with increasingly bizarre funding sources,’ said Bill Imbergamo, executive director of the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, a timber trade group that supports increased logging on federal land.” Smell a GOP anti-environmental policy lurking here? The United States has more billionaires and centimillionaires, even applying inflation adjustments, than we have ever seen in our nation’s history. We also know that a rising tide has never floated all boats. The solution to our underfunded educational system is so obvious. And it ain’t a red answer!

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to see continued violent polarization and radicalization tear this country apart, follow these malign austerity programs to the bitter end… our bitter end.