About

About America's School Trust Library

America's School Trust Library is a working library for the school trust lands — the 77 million acres set aside, beginning in 1785, to fund public education in perpetuity. Most Americans have never heard of these lands. The Library collects the law, history, financial records, and case material that show what was promised, what was done, and what is owed. Our readers are state trust officials, legislators, journalists, scholars, teachers, and the children and grandchildren of the beneficiaries.

The Record pillar

America's School Trust Library keeps the Record pillar of A Forever Gift. The Record keeps the archive: the law, history, accounting, source trails, and case materials. The Advocates pillar points to the national and Oregon advocacy work. The Renewal pillar points to the reform, lawyer-capacity, and institutional-design work that grows out of the record.

The Library is organizing as a nonprofit public benefit corporation under Oregon law. Institutional material now lives at schooltrusts.org: About, draft bylaws, organizing steps, and ways to help. This .net building keeps the public archive, catalog, reading surfaces, and correction pathways.

Who runs the Library

Dave Sullivan is President of OASTL, founder of the Library, and lead plaintiff in the Oregon standing case. He is a retired professor and tree farmer who came to this work after a long career in systems and education.

The Library's day-to-day building — cataloging, drafting, design, the back-end — is carried out in partnership with Claude, an AI system serving as architect and librarian. How that partnership works is described in How the Library Works.

A note on what comes next. The Library's formal organizing materials are now being gathered at schooltrusts.org/organizing. The public record here remains in preview until the Library board adopts it as the Library's publication.

Contact and corrections

The Library expects to be wrong sometimes, and asks readers to help fix it. Anywhere on the site, use the Submit Feedback and Submit Correction controls to send a note tied to the page you are reading. A Library Card (free) lets you track your submissions and our responses. The longer walkthrough is at Contributing; the citation conventions are at How to Cite; the correction protocol is at Corrections; the rights notice and takedown procedure are at Rights, Use, and Takedown.

For institutional contact and governance, start at schooltrusts.org/about. For the record itself, begin with the Catalog. For what we collect, see What the Library Collects; for editorial practice, see Editorial Standards.