Crumbling Rural Schools One Step From ‘Disaster’

Four years ago, the state safety inspector declared this town’s 86-year-old high school, a crumbling brick structure squatting on a hill over downtown, “no longer safe to occupy.” Fix it fast or abandon it, the inspector said.

School officials knew its shortcomings only too well. The fire escape clings to the wall by a couple of loose bolts. Exposed pipes run along the ceiling. The girls locker room sits in a narrow basement space next to the old furnace, and if it ever blows, there’s no escape.

If you think Troy closed down the school and built a new one, think again.

It tried. In 1998, voters were asked to approve a $7.5-million construction bond issue. It failed, as School Superintendent Daryl Bertelsen puts it, “big time.” The following spring, Troy asked voters for $244,000 for repairs. More than 50% said no.

So, the building remains home to 150 students in grades 7 through 12. “We use it because we don’t have anything else,” Bertelsen says. “But it certainly isn’t safe.”

Nor is it alone. At least 53 Idaho school buildings need safety repairs, and only a handful of communities have immediate plans to fix them. Nationwide, at least 25,000 schools need major repairs or outright replacement, the General Accounting Office found in 1995. The National Education Assn. estimates that it would take $322 billion to adequately repair, build and wire schools across the country--with an estimated backlog of $23 billion in California alone.

But in few places is the shortfall as keenly felt as in rural America, where economic decline and a population shift into the cities have left small towns with little money to support their schools--and the fear that they may become ghost towns if they allow the schools to close.

Nowhere is it harder to build a school than in Idaho, where the state provides no general fund construction money. After considering this spring whether to help crumbling schools, the state’s Legislature--the most Republican in America and one committed to local control over education--opted instead to spend a third of its $331-million budget surplus on tax cuts.

Also, Idaho districts must win approval from two-thirds of their voters to do the job themselves, an almost impossible hurdle in places such as the logging community of Orofino--where unemployment is close to 20% and the junior high’s electrical wiring dates back to 1912.

“What I see . . . are disasters waiting to happen,” Stan Kress, superintendent of the Cottonwood school district, told District Judge Deborah A. Bail, who heard a lawsuit filed by several districts against the state. “You pray that if a fire happens, it won’t be in the middle school. Is that really the way we should be dealing with our children?”

In January, Bail declared Idaho’s school funding system unconstitutional. The state is appealing her ruling.

The situation in Cottonwood clearly is not unique. At the elementary school in nearby Weippe, an old oil furnace sits directly under a classroom in a basement that often floods. “We can’t get a certified electrician to work on Weippe Elementary because . . . that would require them to sign off on whatever they’ve done. And they don’t feel comfortable enough with the building to do that,” Supt. Alan Felgenhauer said.

A $3.2-million bond levy in 1989 got only a 33% yes vote, and a $9.9-million levy in 1998 failed with 48.5% approval. The school district relies heavily on federal timber revenues, because so much of it lies within the Clearwater National Forest. Declines in federal timber sales have reduced school logging revenues from an annual $400,000 a decade ago to $40,000 this year.

Unemployment in the district was running about 12% until October, when the Potlatch Corp. closed another mill and put 220 additional people out of work.

“Most of our parents are supportive, but . . . with a super-majority [required for bond issues], we not only have to convince all the parents, but we’ve got to convince a lot of other people,” Felgenhauer said. “With the economy the way it is, we just haven’t been able to.”

And Wendell, a farming region in south-central Idaho, had to abandon its junior-senior high school last year when an engineer warned that it would collapse in an earthquake. It decamped to the district’s only other school, scheduling high school on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and middle school on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

This year, Wendell is busing some students to rented space in another town. A $6.1-million bond issue to build a new school last fall got 61% approval, falling 68 votes short of passing. Another bond issue is on the ballot May 22.

“Idaho’s schools, particularly those in [economically depressed] rural areas, are stretched to the breaking point in meeting the educational needs of their charges,” Bail said in her ruling. And she placed responsibility for meeting those needs squarely on the state, which is obligated under the Constitution to provide safe schools.

School districts had hoped that the Legislature, armed with its $331-million budget surplus this spring, would come forward with new allocations. In a state poll, according to the Idaho Statesman, residents put school repairs at the top of their list for spending the money, and tax breaks for businesses at the bottom.

But the Legislature allocated no money for direct school construction. It did put money into a small program approved last year, creating a $10-million revolving fund to subsidize interest payments for districts with imminent health and safety hazards. The Legislature also extended the payoff time for school bonds, making it easier to finance construction loans.

Nationally, a large number of states provide at least some funding for school construction. California is spending about $500 million a year in state bond money on school construction, out of $6.7 billion in new bond funding approved by voters in 1998. Under that program, the state pays 50% of new construction and 80% of modernization costs. California voters in November also eliminated the two-thirds majority requirement on bond issues that has hampered schools in Idaho and elsewhere.

In Idaho, districts such as Troy, Wendell, Fremont and Minidoka may well benefit from the new interest subsidies set up by the state. All four have bond levies reflecting the state aid on the May 22 ballot. But many schools don’t qualify, and Bail said a system “based on loans alone is not adequate to meet the constitutional mandate.”

Many Republican legislators--who hold 89% of the seats--argued that school construction ought to be a local decision. They said taxpayers in Boise shouldn’t have to bail out rural towns that won’t pay to keep their own, often inefficient, schools open.

“If [rural districts] haven’t done much, then frankly, my question is how much of the responsibility ought to be on the general taxpayers of this state who are already building buildings in their districts that are up to current safety codes?” asked Don Mader, majority caucus chairman in the House.

The problem in Idaho, said Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s education policy advisor, Bill Ruud, is the difficulty of maintaining the character and quality of the state’s rural countryside when the people who live there are few and poor. Nearly 40% of the state’s 1.3-million residents are clustered around Boise.

“Especially out in the West, it’s an ongoing challenge of how do we grow in the 21st century, how do we maintain our lifestyles, how do we keep urban urban and rural rural?” Ruud said. “How do you keep the spirit of places like Salmon, Idaho, Arco, Idaho--places you probably never heard of but, if you went there and I put a fishing pole in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other, you’d stay for three years? Because it’s absolutely gorgeous, and as fresh as it was 100 years ago.”

Troy is one of those places. Lodged between rolling wheat fields and timbered peaks on the edge of Idaho’s fabled Clearwater Country, Troy has become a bedroom community for the University of Idaho at Moscow. Deary, Bovill and Elk River--farther up in the hills--still depend on logging and farming. The four communities combined have 620 school-age children.

One of the problems in approving bond issues over the years has been community rivalry. Troy voters wouldn’t approve money if a new school was going to be built in Deary, 12 miles away; Deary voters wouldn’t buy a school for Troy. It wasn’t a question of busing, people said. They wanted their own schools. What was a community without a school?

Meanwhile, three lumbers mills have closed in the last year, federal logging revenues to the district have dropped from $15,000 to $3,000 a year, and Troy High School wasn’t getting any safer. After the last bond issue failed, community leaders met and decided their only hope was to split the school district, leaving each town to fend for itself.

Troy officials hope their $1.9-million state interest subsidy will be enough to persuade voters to borrow an additional $2.1 million to build a new junior-senior high school. School administrators feel confident it will pass, even though it will raise property taxes higher than anywhere else in the state--an average of an additional $110 a year, on top of the $990 that homeowners are already paying for schools.

Although Bail could order an overhaul in Idaho’s school financing at any time, the districts that sued say they are willing to wait and see whether the Legislature acts during its next session in January.

B.J. Swanson, a Troy parent who has campaigned for more state school funding, said she fears lawmakers will use Troy to argue that interest subsidies are enough.

“But if somebody’s holding up $1.9 million, are you going to say no? Are you going to have the school condemned and send your kids to Deary or Moscow?” she asked.

Bond issue backers point to Elk River, whose school--closed several years ago--stands as a hulking reminder of what used to be a cohesive community. Now, Elk River students drive to Deary.

“If you lose your school in a small community,” Swanson said, “you have lost everything.”