Advocates for School Trust Lands did not start in 2024 when it took its present name. It started, in another form, in the 1990s. The organization that became ASTL was for many years called the Children's Land Alliance Supporting Schools — CLASS for short — and the work CLASS did across two decades is the substrate ASTL's current work rests on. This page tells some of that history.
What CLASS was
CLASS was founded as a federated coalition of state-level organizations whose members shared a common interest in the proper management of school trust lands. Its membership, as documented in CLASS's 2007 institutional materials, included:
- State Parent-Teacher Associations
- State Offices of Education
- State School Boards
- State Teachers' Organizations
- State Principals' and Superintendents' Groups
The coalition's premise was that the school trust lands granted to the western states at statehood — somewhere between 40 million and 50 million acres in total, with a corpus of investment funds that had grown over time into the tens of billions of dollars — were not being administered with the fidelity the trust required. The schools, as beneficiaries, were entitled to the full economic benefit of those lands; in practice, state administrators frequently treated the trust as a state asset to be managed alongside other state assets, with the result that beneficiaries were systematically underserved. CLASS was the coalition organized around correcting that pattern.
The CLASS 2007 mission statement, preserved in the organization's own published materials of the period, ran:
As guardians, the mission of CLASS is to educate and advocate on behalf of the beneficiaries for prudent and profitable management of the school trust lands and permanent funds to sustain each child's birthright to the best possible education.
The continuity from this statement to today's ASTL work is direct. The mission has not changed.
The scholarly inheritance
Two CLASS-era scholars shaped how the organization understood and explained the trust. Their work continues to inform ASTL's contemporary scholarship and advocacy.
Margaret R. Bird has been the principal scholarly voice in the school-trust-lands movement for four decades. Her 2005 paper, A History of Federal Land Grants to Support Public Schools, set out the doctrine that the federal land grants to incoming states constituted a "sacred agreement" between each new state and the federal government, that the schoolchildren held the lands as a "birthright" passed from generation to generation as an endowment for their education, and that the state served as trustee under the standard fiduciary duties that any private trustee would owe to a private beneficiary. The argument she set down in 2005 has been the analytical center of the movement ever since. Twenty-one years later, the Schools of the Republic encyclopedia she co-authored with Dave Sullivan elaborates that argument across nearly 500 pages, with fifty per-state dossiers and a synthesizing structure organized by the federal grant cohort each state received.
Elizabeth Marsh wrote, in the same CLASS era, the plain-language explainers that made the trust-lands legal framework legible to non-lawyer audiences. Her 2007 Enabling Acts: A Brief Explanation lays out how the federal compact works, how the order of legal authority runs from the federal compact down through state constitutions to state statutes, and why the trust the federal government created at statehood cannot be dissolved or weakened by ordinary state legislative action. Her companion essay, The Power of You, takes the legal framework and turns it toward the reader: this is what you are entitled to as a beneficiary representative, this is the standing the doctrine gives you, this is the responsibility you carry. Both pieces are still, nearly two decades later, the cleanest plain-language statements of the school-trust legal architecture and the beneficiary's role inside it that the movement has produced.
Together, Bird and Marsh established that the trust doctrine is rigorous, that it is enforceable, and that it can be explained to readers who have no prior legal background. ASTL's scholarly architecture rests on that foundation.
What CLASS did, in practice
CLASS's working method is the working method ASTL inherits. The organization:
- Documented state-by-state breaches of the trust as they occurred, in real time, through analytical briefs and federal-AG complaint packages where the state actions warranted them;
- Built reference compendia that practitioners and advocates across the western states could draw on, including the 2007 Comparative Reference Grids that present the Enabling Acts and state constitutional architecture across all 20 grant states in one place;
- Convened the cross-state coalition through which information moved among state-level advocates and educators; and
- Sustained the institutional memory that long-running cases require — the kind of memory that allows a coalition in 2026 to draw on briefing work that another coalition member produced in 1989 and have it land cleanly.
The 1989 Margaret Bird presentation to the Utah Legislature on the coal-list fraud — the documented $300 million pattern in which Utah school sections appearing on federal coal lists were sold for $2.25 per acre to buyers who signed affidavits swearing the land was of "non-mineral character" — is one of many CLASS-era productions that the present ASTL coalition continues to draw on. The audit ordered by the Legislature in advance of that presentation was destroyed before it could be presented; the legislature did not re-audit. The pattern is documented in the substrate ASTL maintains.
Why the name changed
The transition from CLASS to ASTL was not a break. It was a renaming. As the work shifted increasingly toward litigation, board-level institutional engagement, and the formal coordination of advocacy across states, the organization's leadership concluded that the new name — Advocates for School Trust Lands — better described what the coalition had become. The CLASS name had served well in the membership-coalition era of the 1990s and early 2000s; the new name signaled the more active enforcement posture the work increasingly required.
The scholarly inheritance, the working method, the cross-state coalition, the focus on the schoolchildren as the trust beneficiaries whose interests must be served — none of that changed.
The contemporary work
ASTL today carries the CLASS inheritance forward across a national footprint:
- State-level reporting and monitoring across the trust-lands states, drawing on Margaret Bird's analytical method
- The publication of new scholarship — including, this year, the Schools of the Republic encyclopedia — that extends the doctrinal substrate Bird and Marsh built
- Convening and supporting state-level coalitions that pursue trust enforcement through whatever combination of education, advocacy, and litigation the state's context warrants
- An expanding state-by-state reference architecture for the twenty trust-lands states
- Strategic coordination with Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands, which is currently engaged in the most significant trust-enforcement litigation of the present period in Siuslaw School District 97J et al. v. State of Oregon, Coos County Circuit Court 24CV38372
The work is the same work CLASS started. The tools are sharper. The coalition is broader. The doctrinal substrate is deeper. The schoolchildren the trust was set aside for in 1785 are still entitled to its benefits in 2026.
A note on sources
The institutional history above draws on documents from CLASS's own publishing record — the 2005 Bird paper, the 2007 Marsh explainer, the 2007 CLASS comparative reference grids, the 2007 institutional information packet that included the CLASS mission statement and member-composition record. ASTL preserves these documents as part of the organization's institutional archive. Readers who want to read the underlying scholarship directly can consult the corresponding Reading Room entries in the Library at schooltrusts.net.