These rural schools face a financial 'cliff.' Will partisan bickering cut off a lifeline?
WASHINGTON — Anmarie Swanstrom had driven four hours along twisting mountain roads, through the fire-scarred Shasta-Trinity National Forest, to Sacramento to catch a red-eye flight.
Now, here she was — a school superintendent from impoverished Hayfork, California — clutching a pair of black high heels, power-walking in bare feet across Capitol Hill.
She had come to plead for money for the 340 students of the Mountain Valley Unified School District, where she also is a principal.
Swanstrom's district will lose a significant chunk of its budget if Congress does not renew the Secure Rural Schools Act, a long-standing program for schools in forested counties, by this fall. She would have to lay people off.
In Hayfork — a boom-and-bust town of 2,300 where timber crashed and legal marijuana is now doing the same — students have little access to medical care. Mental health support comes through the schools, which are also evacuation centers when the mountains burn.
"We serve as the heart of the town, and if the schools go, the town will go completely," Swanstrom said.
People in California's rural northern reaches, in opposition to the state's famously liberal ethos, often feel forgotten in the halls of power in Sacramento and Washington.
