Welcome to America's School Trust Library. This is a building made of
records. Eight rooms open today, more being built; one substrate beneath
them all. The Library has 240 years of receipts on America's school trust
lands and funds — what was promised in 1785 and what's still on the books
today. Come walk through.
The Reading Room
The Reading Room is the curated catalog. Four featured anchors — the
1785 Land Ordinance, Swift's 1911 doctrine, Cardozo's Meinhard,
Margaret Bird's selected essays. Six topic shelves. A dossier for every
public-land 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. Visible incompleteness is the finding.
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.
The Watchful Crew is the Library’s public stewardship ledger: a named
record of who has held a Library office, the tenure they have served, and
the artifacts they have left behind. The crew is the watchdog citizens,
school-board members, journalists, and lawyers who hold the trust on
behalf of the schoolchildren of the Republic — the standing community
without which the seven structural anchors of The Eighth Anchor are
decorative. The page exists because a public reference institution should
be transparent about its own staffing, and because the Eighth Anchor is
people, with names, doing specific work.
Today’s ledger is small. It will grow. The architecture supports adding
State Correspondents, State Co-Librarians, the Library Board, and named
Contributors as those roles are filled and consent is given. Where
pseudonymity is needed — particularly for state-lands-agency staff whose
participation under their real name could be professionally costly — the
verified pseudonym appears in place of the name, and the verification is
held confidentially by the Library Board.
Founder
The named founder of the Library, on the public record from day one.
Dave Sullivan
Founder; lead advocate, Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands (OASTL); architect of the Library’s knowledge substrate (how this works)
Tenure: Founding (April 2026 –)
Artifacts
Founding of America’s School Trust Library and its editorial direction
Lead authorship of The Eighth Anchor
Co-authorship of Schools of the Republic
The Library architecture and the five-layer knowledge substrate (how this works)
How the watchful crew gets built
A ledger of named offices is the public face of the crew; it is not
the mechanism by which the crew gets populated. The mechanism is
one causal chain — route → deliberate → produce → recognize →
constituency → defense — drawn from Margaret Bird's account of
the Utah school-trust reform: route consequential decisions to the
local sites where deliberation already happens; let the deliberation
produce an artifact that bears the deliberator's name; recognize the
artifact in a public record; through that loop, the deliberators
become a constituency that defends the trust politically. The Library
applies the same chain to its own institutional work — consequential
editorial work routed to named contributors, bylines on the artifacts
they produce, the cumulative record on this ledger.
Read the longer account of the mechanism on
How This Library Works →
How to join the ledger
The ledger is filled by the seven roles laid out at
How to contribute. The path is the same in
every case: hold a named office, do the work the office calls for, and the
artifacts you produce — corrections, transcriptions, state pages,
Newsroom items, Board minutes — accrue to your name (or your verified
pseudonym) on this page.
For the catalog of bounded tasks the Library is currently looking for
hands on, see Missions.
Open for applications
The Library is recruiting now. The first State Co-Librarian seats and the
Co-Librarian roster open to outside interest in 2026.
State Co-Librarians
The named senior curators of each state's pages — its State Records, its Counting House entry, its state-specific Reading Room sources. Most State Co-Librarians are current or recent staff of State Departments of Lands, State Treasurers' offices, school-finance offices, or state historical societies. Verified pseudonymity is available where serving under a real name would be professionally costly.
National-scope senior curators with cross-state authority on a doctrinal or topical specialty — trust-law doctrine, financial accounting, federal-policy history, archival method. Seats are small in number. Recruitment is by invitation; the Library welcomes expressions of interest from people who think the role describes them.
The next tiers of the ledger. Each entry below is a placeholder for a list
of named offices that fills in as the Library’s constituency is built.
State Correspondents
Light-commitment watchers of school-trust news in their own states. The roster grows one state at a time as Newsroom items come in.
Names land here as offices are filled.
Library Board
Trustees of the Library itself. The first three to five Board members will be recruited from library science, archives, and digital-library infrastructure once a staff-support line item is funded for the first seat.
Names land here as offices are filled.
Contributors
Library Card holders whose corrections, annotations, and source suggestions have been accepted into the editorial summaries. Contributors are credited on the source pages they have shaped; the per-page record is held with the page itself, and the cumulative record will surface here as the Library matures.
Names land here as offices are filled.
Scholarship the Library draws on
Named scholars whose published work informs the Library’s record.
Citation, not staffing — the Library draws on this scholarship, the
scholars are not Library officers.
Margaret Bird — President of the national Advocates
for School Trust Lands (ASTL); national authority on school-trust law
and the comparative state-by-state record. Forty years inside the
architecture, beginning at the Utah State Office of Education. Her
published writing, NASTL papers, August 2025 video transcripts, and
the eighth-anchor reframe (“Increase the revenue to schools,
get it directly to every single school where the parents, the
teachers, and the principal are deciding how the money is implemented.
And all of a sudden, you have built a huge constituency.”)
are part of the Library’s scholarly substrate. The December 11,
2022 letter to the Oregon State Land Board, in which she named the
decoupling-is-a-euphemism-for-selling diagnosis, is in the
Oregon documentary record.
