America’s School Trust Library
The institution
Living edition — corrected in public. Corrections ledger →
America's School Trust Library
Architectural plan view of the Writing Room — desks with manuscripts in progress, a central conference table for coauthor meetings, flanking bookcases, and side reading nooks. Hand-drafted in oxidized navy ink on parchment, in the visual register of the Library's Spatial Discovery Blueprint.
Looking Forward

Stewards of the Republic

How America's school trusts went wrong — six failures that repeat in state after state — and the law that would repair them. Dave Sullivan. Volume II of A Forever Gift (Looking Forward).

Front Matter

A Note from the Author

This book is about a promise that is failing for reasons we can name — and about a law, drafted and ready, that would stop the failing.

The promise is the school trust: land and funds that every state accepted, at statehood, to hold in trust for its schoolchildren, forever. The first half of this book shows how that promise has gone wrong, and the striking thing the record shows is that it goes wrong the same six ways everywhere. The children cannot sue, and no one can agree on who else may. The trustee's duties, though real, were never written where a judge could read them. The state's own lawyer ends up on both sides of the case. No one ever sends the beneficiaries a statement. Courts that find wrongdoing discover they have no power to order the money back. And the trustees themselves are never taught that they are trustees. No villains required — just a structure that makes neglect the path of least resistance.

The second half is the repair: the Uniform Public Trust Enforcement Act, a model law this project has drafted and put through review. It says nothing new — the duties have existed all along — and changes everything, because it makes them enforceable. It opens the books with a statement the beneficiaries actually receive; it opens the courthouse door; it puts teeth behind judgments; and it is built to maintain itself, so the repair does not depend on the watchfulness of any one generation. Each of those pieces gets its own chapter, and the act itself, annotated, is the appendix.

The book looks forward. The question it asks is not what was lost — its companion volume, The Forgotten Forever Gift to Public Schools, tells that story — but what we can do now to protect the school trusts still standing. And because the school trusts are America's longest-running experiment in keeping a public promise across generations, what protects them speaks, by analogy, to every other forever trust we are now building. Get the repair right where the record is longest, and the lesson travels.

The drafts here are working drafts, published in the open with their known issues stated plainly below. If you see an error or a sharper version of an argument, write to the Reference Desk. This book will be better for it.

— Dave Sullivan, Oregon, 2026.

A note on authorship

Two volumes, two vantage points

Volume 1 of this work, The Forgotten Forever Gift to Public Schools, is the historical record of America's school trust lands. Margaret Bird is the co-author; she has spent her career fighting for school trusts from inside the system, and that work pulls her gaze backward — into what the trusts were promised, what was delivered, and what is owed.

Volume 2, Stewards of the Republic, is the forward-looking case the record makes possible: how the school trusts went wrong, the law that would repair them, and what that repair teaches anyone building a public promise meant to outlast its founders. Volume 2 is mine alone. My background is in information systems; that work pulls my gaze forward, into the question of what could keep a good structure from drifting.

Both volumes stand on their own. A reader can begin with either.

— Dave Sullivan

What's inside

← Writing Room

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