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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.

Who Steals from Children

The 2026 working edition of the annual record of the fight for America's school trust lands.

Writing Room . 2026 working edition

Edited by David Sullivan

This book keeps the present-tense record: where school trusts are being diverted, where they are being defended, where old law is being recovered, and where people have stepped forward to make the beneficiary claim visible again.

Current draft

2026 working edition

The current public draft is the June 8, 2026 review build. It is the national annual survey edition of Who Steals from Children, not the older Oregon-only Volume 1 page that previously occupied this address. The Oregon origin story is now carried separately by The Accidental Plaintiff.

Download the current Word draft ->

What this book does

School-trust failures are easy to miss when each state is treated as a local anomaly. The point of this annual record is to make the pattern legible. Each edition gathers state portraits, live disputes, recovery examples, and contributor records in one place so trustees, lawyers, parents, librarians, and advocates can see the national field rather than a set of scattered local fights.

The working edition remains open to correction. Claims are meant to be checked against primary records; unresolved items stay visible until they are verified or withdrawn.

What's inside

Opening record

Editor's Preface and State of the Fight

The reason for keeping an annual public record, the current shape of the field, and the difference between a trust promise on paper and a trust someone is watching.

State portraits

Oregon, Nevada, South Dakota, and Mississippi

Four current working portraits showing different faces of the same fiduciary problem: seizure, drift, recovery, and enforceable trustee duties.

Dispatches

Where the fight is moving now

Short present-tense reports from litigation, legislation, public records, agency practice, and local advocates as the school-trust field comes back into view.

Credits

Who stepped up

A place to name the people who held records, made claims visible, corrected the Library, or carried a state fight far enough for others to see.

A record people can add to

The Library is looking for documented school-trust fights from every state: agency records, court papers, board minutes, local histories, trustee reports, and first-person accounts from people who lived the fight. A trust survives only when somebody is watching, and the record gets stronger when the witnesses bring the paper.

Write to the Reference Desk with a state, a document, or a correction.

Back to the Writing Room

Preview publication — cite the linked primary sources; interpretive framing is provisional.