About ASTL

A national coalition for the schoolchildren who hold the trust.

Advocates for School Trust Lands holds states to their fiduciary duty as trustees of the school trust lands — securing a robust and sustainable birthright for public schools.

ASTL is a national coalition that works across the twenty-plus federal-grant trust-lands states. Our work runs across four complementary surfaces — the Briefing Room for state-level reporting, The Ledger for the receipts behind the work, the State Tracker for the comparative reform record. The shorter routes in — the 90-second explainer and the Field Notes — are the doors most new visitors come through.

The institutional history

ASTL did not start in 2024 when it took its present name. It started in another form in the 1990s, as the Children's Land Alliance Supporting Schools — CLASS for short — and the work CLASS did across two decades is the substrate our current work rests on.

Read our institutional history → Our Roots in CLASS

Proven results

ASTL's record includes concrete results from principled trust-land advocacy: a full-market hunting valuation that produced about $1.8 million annually for school trust lands, a stopped $5 million grazing-refund loss through an Attorney General opinion, and Utah Permanent State School Fund growth from about $1 billion to nearly $4 billion in six years after the call for independent professional oversight.

Contact and governance

General ASTL contact: 801-600-0052 and toniaday@schooltrustlands.org. This is the ASTL contact address.

Governance and social links: current bylaws, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Dedication

This site is dedicated to Scott Smith.

When Advocates for School Trust Lands had no website it could update and no good way to tell its own story, Scott Smith stepped forward. He didn't know Squarespace — but he offered to learn it and build the site himself, for the coalition. Page by page, by hand, he gave ASTL its first real public voice and kept it alive for years.

Everything here is built on the foundation he laid. With gratitude, the Board of Advocates for School Trust Lands dedicates this website — and every ASTL website that follows — to Scott Smith.

Recently in school trust history

Idaho Admission

Idaho admitted with sections 16 and 36 of each township granted in trust for schools. Idaho's Endowment Fund Investment Board continues to manage the proceeds today.

Idaho state page →