For legislators, trustees and agency staff
What this Library is
America’s School Trust Library is an Oregon nonprofit public benefit corporation, Oregon Registry No. 259005891, formed in July 2026. It collects, verifies and publishes the record of the school trust lands the United States granted to the states at statehood — what was granted, what was promised, what happened to it, and what the courts have said about it. Beginning in 1785, Congress set aside land in every township — the six-mile survey square the country was laid out in — to support the public schools; roughly twenty states still hold those lands and their funds today. The Library publishes in the open, corrects in public, and keeps a numbered corrections ledger anyone can read. Everything is free: no fee, no account, no affiliation. It takes no side in any case or campaign.
It is not asking you for money. It asks for documents and hands.
schooltrusts.org
Your state’s page is your state’s record
You are among the people who already hold this record. The Library asks two things of you, and neither is a position.
Read what it says about your state. Tell it what it has wrong.
It is not asking for a bill, a hearing, a vote, testimony, or an endorsement. It has no position of its own to endorse.
How the page is built
Each state has a file, and the file runs in a fixed order: the federal grant that created the trust; the state’s own constitutional and statutory language accepting it; the decisions; the money — what the fund holds and what it distributes; and last, plainly marked, the gaps the Library has not been able to close.
It is citable. The Library publishes a how-to-cite page, keeps a numbered corrections ledger, and does not silently rewrite what it has published: a later correction creates an erratum — a dated note saying what was wrong and what it now says — or a successor version, so a citation made this year can still be checked in ten. Its Counting House — the room that holds the state funds, fund by fund — carries a confidence marker on each figure. Its Map Room records, state by state, who publishes their accounts and who does not.
It is checkable against you. If a figure on your state’s page is stale, wrong, or drawn from a report your office has since superseded, that is exactly what the Library needs to hear. A free Library Card opens the correction form; write to the Library instead if you would rather not open one. Either way, reporting an error asks no agreement with anything else the Library says. A credible challenge gets a reasoned answer, and if the answer is unsatisfying it can be appealed to someone who did not decide it the first time.
What you can send
Old agency reports; board minutes; lease and sale records; audits; maps; the annual report from the years before the website. Public-record material from any of the school-trust states. If you are not sure whether something belongs, describe it rather than send it, and the Library will tell you.
Nothing confidential. Nothing privileged. Nothing your agency treats as closed. The Library does not want it and will not take it.
The curator’s seat, if you want it
A State Co-Librarian — the Library’s senior curator for one state’s records — curates that state’s corner of the collection: reviewing what is there, flagging what is wrong, identifying the period sources that should be added (original enabling-act language, period audit reports, attorney-general opinions on the trust corpus, superintendents’ reports, reform-era statutes) and triaging what readers in the state send in.
Five to ten hours a month after an onboarding pass. Standing accrues; the commitment is bounded; it renews annually. The state’s pages carry the curator’s name.
What the Library asks is accuracy, good faith, and a few hours. What it does not ask: political alignment; a position on any active litigation, any pending audit, or any policy dispute; or any material your agency considers confidential. It asks, narrowly, for help making the public record of your state’s school lands findable, accurate, and in context.
The Library is grateful for the work the people who administer these lands do every day, and is built to make that work more visible to the country whose framers established it.
Write two paragraphs to the Library at library@schooltrusts.net, addressed to the Secretary, Kenneth Magee — or apply directly at /apply/state-co-librarian/. Either route reaches a person.
In the first, say which state you know and how you know it — the office you work in or worked in, the years, the records you handled. In the second, say what you would take on and roughly how much time you have.
If you want the pseudonymity tier, tick the box for it on the application page. The verification is handled by the board and stays with the board.
If you would rather start smaller than a letter, start with a correction: open your state’s file at schooltrusts.org/states/ and report the first thing that is out of date. A free Library Card opens the correction form, and the correction is credited to you by name unless you ask otherwise.
One honest limit
The Library has not yet filed its application for federal tax-exempt recognition; it is being prepared. No federal tax-exemption determination has been issued, and until one is, the Library does not describe contributions as tax-deductible.
