Timber Sales Affecting Rural Schools

BRANSON MO NEWS:

BRANSON, Mo. – Many schools in Missouri may soon be making cuts. That is if the federal funding they’ve depended on for years, doesn’t come through.That federal money is called Secure Rural Schools, or SRS. It’s generated by U.S. Forest timber sales and other dollars that come from federally owned land.Each year, every state divides the money among it’s school districts based on it’s national forest acreage. But since 2015, there has been a lapse in those funds.SRS funding started in 1908 and continued until 1999, with many of the nation’s schools getting 25% of the dollars from the timber sales. In the year 2000, Congress increased the amount to 50%.But in 2015, the allocated amount was diverted back to it’s original 25%. For most of the schools receiving that money, the cut was a tough hit.Joe Donely, Superintendent/Principal for Mark Twain R8 School District, understands this first hand. “For us the SRS money is about 6 1/2 percent of our total budget. So it’s a large portion.” Donely says that large portion hit them pretty hard. It was money they counted on to make ends meet.“Well we first felt the crunch last year, when we thought we were budgeted to get about 56- thousand dollars from this and we end up getting uh about 33-thousand. So about a 23, 24 thousand dollar decrease we didn’t expect.”Dr. Eric Allen, Superintendent at Alton R4 in Oregon County, is spearheading the effort to get their voices heard in Washington. He says just under 100 schools in his district are greatly affected by the decrease in funds. “They are a couple of schools that literally get 2 or 3 thousand dollars if it’s fully funded. So you would roughly cut that in half. And then Alton is the largest recipient of this …