America's School Trust Library

An evidentiary archive of America's school trust lands and funds

If you are a parent, a school board member, or a neighbor of land you have driven past your whole life, this record is about you. Roughly twenty states still hold school trust land, and it is earning money right now. In many of them you cannot easily find out how much it earned last year, who decided what to do with it, or how much reached a classroom — not because the answer is secret, but because the record is scattered across state agencies, court files, and old statutes, and nobody has gathered it in one place.

This Library gathers it and shows its sources, so that a parent at a school board meeting, a reporter on deadline, and a legislator drafting a bill can all check the same shelf and none of them has to take our word for it. Where a state has not published its accounting, the Counting House says so and names it: the silence is part of the record too.

In 1785, two years before the Constitution and four years before George Washington took office, the Continental Congress passed a Land Ordinance that did something quietly radical: it set aside one parcel of land in every six-square-mile township of the new western territories, forever, to fund public schools. The schools didn't exist yet. The townships didn't exist yet. The states that would claim those townships didn't exist yet. But the principle did: before the United States organized itself into private property, it carved out a piece of the public domain for the public's children.

By 1959, when Hawaii became the fiftieth state, the federal government had granted approximately 77 million acres for school trust purposes — an area larger than Italy. The state is the trustee. The schoolchildren of that state, present and future, are the beneficiaries.