Secure Rural Schools funding gap shutters Columbia Gorge middle school

In mid-August at the Wind River Middle School in Carson, Washington, teachers would normally be prepping lesson plans for kids coming back to school. But this year, the lights are off and the hallways are stacked with chairs and boxed up school supplies.

The middle school closed in part because a critical federal funding source, known as Secure Rural Schools, was not renewed by Congress. The district has its fair share of funding challenges, most of which come back to declining student enrollment. But losing the approximately $830,000 payment from the federal government blew an irreparable hole in the budget of the only middle school in the Stevenson-Carson School District.

“Developmentally, we wanted a space for middle schoolers to be themselves, to develop and grow in their own place at their own rate with each other,” said Superintendent Ingrid Colvard. “So, for the community that’s a loss.”

Before school starts on Aug. 27, the district moved about 45 sixth graders back to the community’s elementary school, and 117 seventh and eighth graders were slotted into the high school early.

The Secure Rural Schools program was created in 2000 to replace revenue from the federal government for timber harvested on public land within county borders. But Congress has to reauthorize the program each year, an aspect Colvard described as “always a rollercoaster.”

In 2024, the rural schools payments were attached to legislation that included controversial cuts to SNAP benefits, the federal food assistance program.

“I knew we were in big trouble,” Colvard said.

With no other real funding source, the district was out of options. They closed the middle school and laid off the equivalent of 10 positions including counselors, a therapist, paraeducators and district office staff.

More students in fewer schools

Lillian Chambers was expecting to attend Wind River Middle School this fall. Instead, the seventh grader will be at the high school.

“I feel like it’ll be fine, just other than having the older kids,” Lillian said. “It might get rowdier sometimes and crowded, but at least it’s not the elementary school.”

“The teachers will definitely have more classes,” she said.

Lillian and her father, Mark Chambers, were standing at a stretch of family property along the Wind River just outside Carson. It’s a place the Chambers have come to for decades of potlucks and Memorial Days after Mark’s great-great grandfather purchased it in the 1940s. At family events when he was little, Mark said, the crowd was bigger and more filled with children. It’s gotten older over the years.

The county is being squeezed in multiple directions, Mark said. Timber revenue has declined. Nearly 80% of Skamania County’s land is federally-managed forest that can’t be used to collect taxes. Most of the remaining land is exempt from property taxes because it’s county, city or church property, as well as private timber land with long-term tax breaks. That leaves just 1.4% of the county’s land base that can be taxed at full market value to fund public services like police, libraries and school districts, according to Skamania County Assessor Gabe Spencer.

While rural, Carson is just a half hour from upscale towns like Hood River. More retirees are moving to Carson to gain access to the trendy neighboring towns, pricing out younger families from the housing market and contributing to the decline of school-aged kids. That drop in school enrollment lowers funding allocations from the state. Losing federal Secure Rural Schools money, not to mention the associated job cuts at the middle school, is just the latest challenge.

“It’s kind of a viscous cycle,” Mark said.

That’s a fear shared by Jeff Wickersham, the Stevenson-Carson School District school board president.

“People start looking for better opportunities for their children,” he said.

There’s a decent chance the school would have had to close at some point because of declining enrollment alone, Wickersham said, which has dropped from around 900 kids at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to less than 700 now. The district’s elementary school in nearby Stevenson also closed last year and had to be consolidated with another school. But if they still had Secure Rural Schools funds, the Wind River closure wouldn’t have been so abrupt.

“I think it’s important for Congress to recognize the impacts to some of our small communities,” Wickersham said. “People call this home, and it does feel like a slap in the face at times when we just feel like we’re being forgotten.”

Skamania County voters supported Republicans in every partisan race of the 2024 election, but none were as close as in the 3rd Congressional District. It’s held by Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of Congress’ biggest champions of renewing Secure Rural Schools funding. Gluesenkamp Perez supports the goals of the increased timber harvest under Trump administration policies, she said, assuming the proceeds go to rural communities.

“I’m committed to advancing the agency of timber communities in Southwest Washington to increase their harvest, and building the bipartisan momentum necessary to reauthorize SRS will remain an absolute top priority of mine in the immediate future,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement.

According to Superintendent Colvard, smaller graduating class sizes will continue to be a trend in the coming years. She said the district has shrunk just enough that schools need to be consolidated.

“Some of those adjustments are natural but, again, ideally we would have a sixth through eighth grade experience for kids,” she said.

Uncertainty around increased logging

Secure Rural Schools payments go to counties in states across the West. Payments from timber harvests dried up in the 1990s because of stricter environmental regulations and new forest management policies. Secure Rural Schools payments were designed by lawmakers to fill the gap.

The funds get split between county governments and school districts. The amount each county gets is based on historic timber revenues, how much federal land they have and local income levels. In Washington, Skamania County received more funding than any other county in 2023, the last year the program was operating.

But the Secure Rural Schools program was never meant to be permanent. It was designed to shrink over time with the hope that counties would find new ways to pay for services.

A spokesperson for the Secure Rural Schools program with the U.S. Forest Service did not respond to an interview request.

Some residents are holding out hope that the Trump administration’s push for increased timber harvest on federally managed lands will help plug the budget hole at school districts like those in Carson.

But there’s just one sawmill remaining in Skamania County. High Cascade Incorporated produces construction lumber, mostly from Douglas fir trees. Unlike large industrial timber companies such as Weyerhaeuser, High Cascade doesn’t own timberland. The company relies on logs from federal, state and county property.

“This mill is located here because we are a stone’s throw away from the (Gifford Pinchot) National Forest,” said Garret Stump, High Cascade’s president. Stump was born and raised in Skamania County and is the third generation in his family to work in the logging industry.

In a March 2025 executive order aimed at boosting timber harvests, the Trump administration called for a 25% increase in trees cut on federally managed lands over the next five years. Increasing timber production enough to offset existing federal Secure Rural Schools payments would not be difficult, according to Stump. But it takes time to organize timber sales, do the road work to access trees and harvest them, he said. Stump estimates those steps would take around three years before counties saw an increase in payments.

“I would love nothing more than that, but I don’t know how realistic it is in the short term to be an immediate replacement for SRS,” Stump said.

The Trump administration’s budget reconciliation bill also called for increased logging on federal lands. But the U.S. Treasury has sought to take over revenue from those timber sales without following longstanding rules to share that money with local counties.

While the Stevenson-Carson School District has already made the difficult decision to mothball the Wind River Middle School, they could still use federal funds if Congress reauthorized them. Standalone legislation to reauthorize Secure Rural Schools was passed by the U.S. Senate, but didn’t receive a vote from the House before members left for the summer. Restarting the program would allow the district to hire back support staff at the elementary and high schools.

Long-term, the solution is more complicated. The community has already passed local tax levies to support the school district. That leaves the option of convincing the state government to better fund rural schools, Wickersham said. Or, for Colvard, harvesting more trees to get away from the instability of Secure Rural Schools entirely.

“The solution is to bring back those living wage jobs and try to let us take care of ourselves again,” she said.