Welcome to America's School Trust Library. This is a building made of
records. Nine rooms are open today and more are being built. Beginning
in 1785, Congress set aside land in every township to support public
schools; this Library gathers what survives of that record — what was
promised, what the land earned, and what each state has and has not
published. Come walk through.
The Reading Room
The Reading Room is the curated catalog. Six topic shelves. A dossier
for every state. If you want to know where to start in the
Library, start here.
The Writing Room is where the long-form arguments live. The
school-trust-law hornbook, in complete first draft. The Forgotten
Forever Gift to Public Schools, the history. Who Steals from
Children, the Oregon record. Stewards of the Republic,
the look forward. And open essays addressed to the architects of the
next forever-trusts.
The Atlas is one map, four lenses — see the trust architecture as a
national pattern. The Map Room sits next door with state-by-state
transparency directories: who publishes the books, who hides them, who
never reported.
The Counting House is the ledger. Every state, every fund, every figure
with a confidence badge. Some states publish enough accounting for
public audit; many still do not.
The Newsroom logs the live record — court motions, hearings,
settlements. Voices is the editorial column where librarians and
contributors take a position on what the record shows. Want a Library
Card? It's free; it tracks your reading and lets you contribute.
Historical talks, films, and recorded proceedings.
The Lecture Hall is the room for recorded talks and historical films
on America's school-trust lands — primary-source video alongside the
written archive elsewhere in the Library. This opening slate is
three historical and archival pieces. Future expansions will add
the standard one-hour overview deck, the legislative briefing, the
school-board version, the donor pitch, and the Talk Recipe
localization guide that walks a speaker through tuning the standard
deck to a specific state.
The three opening videos below are presented as historical record:
primary-source multimedia preserved for study, not advocacy
programming produced by this Library. Captions identify each piece's
origin and the moment it documents.
A Birthright Forever
Advocates for School Trust Lands · 12-minute film
A national overview of state school-trust lands. Features Dick
Molpus (Mississippi), Claire Orr (Colorado), Cathy Post
(Oklahoma), and Margaret Bird (Utah). Produced by Advocates for
School Trust Lands.
A historical archive video showing pre-reform Utah trust-lands
management. Companion to Utah's post-reform multi-billion-dollar
Permanent School Fund — the canonical recovery case study.
The May 2017 State Land Board meeting at which the Board voted to
keep the Elliott State Forest in public ownership and direct DSL
to pursue decoupling.