CRAIG, Colo. — Noah Pike nearly had the money in hand.
Growing up in Colorado’s coal belt, Pike constantly heard his father, uncles and both grandfathers talk about how much they earned in the mines. Most bought starter homes in their early 20s and never borrowed a penny.
After graduating from high school last spring, with no desire to attend college, Pike couldn’t resist the lure of Craig Station’s starting hourly wage of up to $40 for maintenance workers on heavy mining equipment.
“It’s just a really good living,” Pike said. “I could be making the same as someone coming out of college, if they even find a job. And I won’t be in any debt.”
The 19-year-old also knew it would only ever be a temporary job. By the time Moffat County’s current class of high school freshmen graduate, in 2028, the utility company that owns Craig Station will shutter its remaining mines and coal-burning units.
Days before his first shift, Pike injured his wrist during a workout and never started the job, complicating his plan to earn “good, fast money” at the mines. Now, much like the town of Craig itself, he’s forced to consider what a future looks like without coal as a financial guarantee.
The announcement of Craig Station’s closure, and that of five other coal plants across the state, followed Colorado’s decision to cut in half its carbon emissions by the end of this decade. It’s part of a national transition away from fossil fuels that pollute and cause climate change, spurred both by environmental policy and consumer demand. While President Donald Trump has vowed to “unleash” domestic energy, including coal, and attempted to block investments in renewable energy, experts and people here say those efforts are unlikely to fundamentally alter the shift toward clean energy in this corner of Colorado and some other parts of the country.
Preparation for the unfolding energy transition, however, has been uneven, and some states that rely on extraction revenues, such as Wyoming, have resisted changes.
Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has pressured state agencies to help local governments survive economic losses from the transition to clean energy, largely by trying to lure new and potentially green industries to these communities. The state also has placed a priority on retraining current coal workers and getting them new jobs. But K-12 schools — the primary vehicle to train future workers in rural communities and also the main beneficiary of coal tax revenues — get only brief mentions in the state transition plans.
“It’s really simple: Schools stand to lose millions of dollars per year in dependable revenue,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at the think tank Resources for the Future who has studied how state and local governments rely on fossil fuels to stay afloat. But most transition policies focus narrowly on short-term employment, Raimi said.
“Everyone thinks about jobs every day,” he said. “We don’t all think about the source of our school funding every day.”
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Across Moffat and Routt counties in northern Colorado, school districts stand to lose up to half of their entire tax base when the coal plants shutter. Already, the slowdown of operations has started to erode some local school budgets, worsening long-standing struggles to attract teachers to these rural communities. Several districts and regional colleges have tried to combine resources; they plan to beef up agricultural, nursing and trade classes so students can explore careers outside of the mines.
Educators, parents and young people like Pike can’t afford to wait for what comes of the transition. One teacher left the classroom to create a welding school to retrain coal miners, though recent high school graduates have filled the student roster in recent months. Parents who raised families on miner salaries now warn their children against any jobs in extraction industries, cautioning them against chasing a big salary alone.
Pike has watched many friends pack their bags. They leave either for four-year universities or lucrative extraction jobs in other states.
“I would like to keep living here,” Pike said, “but I don’t know if I have a choice.”
Both the nation’s production and consumption of coal have dropped by virtually half since 2014, and coal has since slipped to the smallest share of electricity generation in the U.S., behind natural gas, renewables and nuclear. At its peak in the 1920s, coal employed more than 860,000 miners nationwide. Today, only about 40,000 people work in coal mines.
Researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research have estimated “the demise of coal” could lower local government revenues in coal-reliant counties by 20 percent. But in a 2021 study, they also noted their analysis did not account for the “potential downward spiral” on other parts of a local economy.
“That’s not as many workers buying tools or vehicles or homes. That impacts the entire region,” said Kirk Henwood, superintendent of the South Routt School District.
The SoRoCo school district, as it’s called locally, has accidental experience with the sudden collapse of its funding base.
The rural district of 350 students lost close to a third of its revenue in 2016 when a bankrupt coal firm didn’t pay property taxes. A judge later approved back payments, but the experience jolted local leaders. They took rumors of the nearby Hayden Station’s closure seriously and moved quickly starting in 2018 to trim the district’s budget by leaving vacant positions unfilled and not hiking salaries.
Mineral lease monies, which once made up 40 percent of its revenue, now make up just 10 percent, according to Henwood. But, he added, the cost cutting has made it even more difficult for the district to compete with Steamboat Springs, the wealthy ski-resort town where teachers already earned up to $10,000 more a year.
“Their custodians make more money. Their teachers make more money,” Henwood said. “As their tourism continues to grow, our coal’s declining at the same time and they can keep spending.”
Students notice.
Pike, who attended the only high school in sprawling Moffat County, recalled that many teachers stayed only a year. The high turnover left him feeling disconnected from educators and worried that no one adult cared about his future.
The exception was the National FFA Organization, an after-school club for students interested in agriculture. His advisers, both teachers who stayed throughout his time in high school, introduced students to topics ranging from wood shop to wildlife management. They assigned metalworking projects too; his senior project — designing, building and selling a chicken coop — tested his welding skills.
“I was like, ‘Dang. That’s fun,’” he said. “The sound when you start welding – it’s just like sizzling bacon if it’s right. It just sounds so good.”
An FFA adviser noticed Pike’s interest in welding, and he received a scholarship to attend the new trade school in town.
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Late one recent winter evening, welding fumes filled the air in a brightly lit warehouse near Hayden’s cluster of manufacturing hangars. Pike and 14 other adult students — some just finishing a double shift at a nearby mine — fused chunks of metal together and raced the clock on their final certification test. Each paid $2,500 for 10 weeks of classes at the Colorado Welding Institute, the only school on this side of the Rocky Mountains in the state to offer a welding certification.
The institute, started by former Hayden school board member and vocational teacher Kevin Kleckler, opened in April 2022. He said he wanted to better expose students to career pathways beyond the mines, and local schools weren’t doing enough to provide that.
“They’ll dabble a little with welding here or agriculture there,” Kleckler said. “They’re not really preparing kids, honestly.”
Students in his classes learn to cut and weld structural steel and pipe. They train with plasma cutters and in scenarios to simulate underwater welding, and some of the teenagers with only a certification or two already scored jobs with construction crews and general contractors. Across the state, welders can earn a starting salary of almost $40,000; in Moffat County, with inflated mining wages, entry-level salaries top $70,000.
When Colorado five years ago committed to reducing its greenhouse gas pollution, it recognized the economic cost of that shift and developed grant programs to assist cities and counties as they wean themselves off extraction revenues. A new state Office of Just Transition has $15 million to support local governments trying to lure new employers, improve their infrastructure and retrain coal workers.
But the state’s official transition plan, released in late 2020, mentions schools only a handful of times, mostly to note how painful the drop in property taxes will be for the education sector and reeducation for current coal workers.
In an emailed statement, Eric Maruyama, a spokesman for the Colorado governor, did not directly address the state’s lack of attention to K-12 schools in the transition plan but said that Polis believes every student deserves a high-quality education that prepares them for the workforce.
“He is proud to have fully funded K-12 schools for the first time since 2009 and updated the school finance formula to fund students’ education where they are, helping ensure all students, including those in former coal towns, get the best education possible,” Maruyama said.
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In Wyoming, the nation’s single largest producer of coal, the state has banked on its mineral wealth to make it the biggest spender per student in the Mountain West. As extraction industries erode, any talk of raising revenue another way or investing in a diversified energy sector falls flat in such a conservative, anti-tax state, said Brian Farmer, executive director of the Wyoming School Boards Association.
Republican Gov. Mark Gordon sparked fierce opposition when he recently pledged to reduce Wyoming’s carbon emissions. “People feel that’s anti-extraction, that’s against the lifeblood of this state,” Farmer said.
Already, the coal money that Wyoming relies on to pay for school construction has started to evaporate. The state’s only underground mine closed in recent years, and there have been no federal lease sales of coal in Wyoming for more than a decade. State economic analysts have forecast that severance taxes from coal will dip below $90 million by 2030, less than a third of what it was in 2011. Federal mineral royalties, meanwhile, are projected to generate no money for school construction starting this year.
“For counties facing imminent closure and large-scale cutbacks, if they haven’t been planning on this for a while, they most certainly will need help,” Raimi said.
He’s also skeptical that “colocation” — such as retrofitting underground mines to feed water to a hydropower station — could offer a lifeline for coal-reliant communities: “There’s physically not enough space to build all the wind turbines and solar panels that you would need to generate the same government revenue.” Communities will suffer some short-term economic pain, he said, as they work to create a much more diversified mix of industries.
Still, Megan Degenfelder, the state superintendent of public instruction, said she believes a Republican in the White House again may reverse dwindling mineral wealth. In an emailed statement, Degenfelder said an “increase in mineral revenue off federal lands is expected to occur under the Trump administration and that has the potential to substantially increase revenues for Wyoming schools.”
Back in Colorado, some parents and community leaders question whether the Hayden and Moffat County school districts have ignored the inevitable.
Hayden schools, where enrollment now nears 450 students, stands to lose more than half its taxable value when the power plant closes. For day-to-day operations, Colorado’s funding formulas will mostly keep Hayden schools afloat: Whenever local revenues drop for a district, the state’s pool of money from other districts fills in the gap.
This equalization, however, doesn’t extend to any debt that districts issued for school construction and other facility needs.
In 2018, as talk swirled of the plant’s long-away closure, voters approved $22 million in new debt to pay for much-needed upgrades to the Hayden middle and high schools. Any of those voters who also own property will now be on the hook to cover the debt payments once the Hayden Station’s share evaporates.
Mat Mendisco, the town manager, warned that homeowners in Hayden — including many laid-off miners — could face potentially skyrocketing tax bills.
“It would be tantamount to a small recession, only in Hayden, forced upon us,” Mendisco said.
It’s an uncomfortable topic for nearly everyone, including district leaders. Neither the Hayden nor Moffat County school districts made representatives available for interviews. Some families in Moffat question why the district hasn’t changed anything about what they’re teaching students.
“They don’t prepare them for the real world,” said Nikki Robison, who had three children in Moffat County schools “Yes, they have math and literature and history. But what, really, will young adults do with that if they don’t go to college?”
Robison said she tried to persuade her sons to never work in coal, but they didn’t follow her advice: Today, both of them work in the mines with their dad and four other family members.
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In early 2021, the Hayden and SoRoCo districts won a $1 million grant from the governor’s office to create one of several new rural alliances between K-12 schools, higher education and local employers. The Yampa Valley partnership aimed to create new career and college pathways for students, with nearly $2 million in additional funding to support the expansion of agriculture, energy and natural resource classes.
The partnership’s founding director resigned suddenly last year, however, and plans for the energy and natural resource pathways have yet to become a reality. Henwood, who also serves as chair of the alliance, said it will now focus on health care and construction trades, including green building.
If the school districts did eventually start an energy and natural resources pathways, graduates might have a chance to someday work in new enterprises that state and local leaders hope to draw to the region.
Both the city of Hayden and Steamboat Springs will pursue geothermal heat in the region as an energy source, with planning grants from the state. One company, from Florida, has pitched converting the Twentymile Mine near both cities into a reservoir for a hydropower project. The state’s Office of Just Transition funded a study into a similar proposal to develop hydropower in Craig. And just last year, the utility that operates the Hayden Station proposed turning its coal-burning units into a biomass plant.
No corporate projects have won formal approval yet. Jennifer Pieroni, who works for the Office of Just Transition to connect coal workers with retraining, wondered who will work for those new projects if only 1 in 5 residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
“If it’s not going to be them, who else can apply or even qualify for these jobs?” she said.
There’s also little indication so far that the White House efforts to boost domestic energy production will dramatically change the outlook on the ground in this part of Colorado. That said, the Trump administration has hinted that it’s working on a “market-based” plan to halt the closure of coal plants.
“We’ve got to not only grow new production, but we’ve got to stop digging the hole, which means stop shutting down existing, viable, economic plants,” new Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told Bloomberg.
Neither the utility companies involved nor town officials have indicated that they plan to change course.
Pike, the aspiring welder, said he believes Trump could prolong the life of coal, “but I’m not sure how long.” He’s overheard his parents and neighbors talking about the clean energy plans for Craig and surrounding coal towns. The geothermal projects will create plenty of jobs, he said, adding that he thinks Steamboat graduates and residents will fill them.
As his wrist recovers, Pike has started looking at openings for welding jobs in the area. So far, he’s applied to two, but hasn’t heard back from either. And he still hopes the mines could at least be a stopgap: He plans to contact Craig Station in the spring to see if he can find temporary work there.
That said, in December, his dad shared some unexpected news: He plans to retire from the plant before it shuts down in 2028. Pike’s parents told him they want to sell their longtime Craig home and move out of Colorado entirely.
Pike may leave with them.
“Once the mines close, it will be harder to keep anything open,” Pike said. “I don’t know, realistically, if there will be a Craig, as a town, in the future.”
Contact Neal Morton at 212-678-8247 or morton@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Yampa Valley was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate and education newsletter.
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CRAIG, Colo. — Noah Pike nearly had the money in hand. Growing up in Colorado’s coal belt, Pike constantly heard his father, uncles and both grandfathers talk about how much they earned in the mines. Most bought starter homes in their early 20s and never borrowed a penny. After graduating from high school last spring,
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