Oregon is the live test case for whether schoolchildren can legally hold a state accountable for school-trust mismanagement.
- Admitted
- Feb 14, 1859
- Federal grant
- ~3.4M acres
- CSF corpus
- ~$2.0B (Jun 2025)
- FY2025 distribution
- $76.8M
- Status
- Active litigation
The Common School Fund
On admission to the Union in 1859, Oregon received from the federal government two sections of land out of every 36-section township — Sections 16 and 36 — for the perpetual support of common schools. The grant totaled roughly 3.4 million acres.
Across the second half of the nineteenth century, most of these lands were sold. The proceeds were not spent; they were placed in a permanent trust — the Common School Fund — to be invested and to distribute earnings, in perpetuity, to the beneficiaries: Oregon’s public schoolchildren.
As of June 30, 2025, the Common School Fund stood at roughly $2.0 billion in corpus. FY2025 distributions to schools totaled approximately $76.8 million.
The decoupling problem. Over time, large portions of revenue that should flow to schools have been redirected, diluted, or absorbed into general state programs. OASTL’s position is that this is not a policy disagreement; it is a breach of the duty to pay income to the beneficiary.
The Elliott State Forest
Around 1920, a State Forester named Francis Elliott recognized that scattered school-trust parcels would never function as a productive endowment. He proposed — and over the following years achieved — a consolidation by federal exchange. The result was a single contiguous forest on the southern Oregon coast: the Elliott State Forest, the surviving heart of Oregon’s school-trust real assets.
Jerry Phillips joined the Elliott as a forester in 1956 and retired as its long-term manager in 1989. His book — written from inside the forest he managed — remains the standard reference. ORWW.org keeps it online and free.
The Elliott State Research Forest Authority controversy. Recent proposals have moved the Elliott toward research-only / passive management. OASTL takes a substantive editorial position against that direction.
Active management for sustained yield and fire resilience.
Passive management accumulates flammable carbon. Under Pacific Northwest conditions, that load eventually burns. Active management — harvest, thinning, road maintenance, salvage — keeps the forest productive for the beneficiaries and lowers catastrophic-fire risk for the watershed and the communities downstream.
As historian John Barry has put it: “When you mix science and politics, you get politics.” OASTL’s view is that the research-only frame substitutes a political preference for the trustee’s fiduciary obligation to make trust property productive.
Cascadia Wildlands (2019) — the doctrinal door, and the sentence the State omits
Cascadia Wildlands v. Department of State Lands, 365 Or 750 (2019), is the Oregon Supreme Court decision the State leans on most in the framework of its 24CV38372 MSJ. Read carefully, the case cuts both ways — and the way it cuts against the State is the sentence the State leaves out.
What Cascadia held
ORS 530.450 — prohibiting the State Land Board from selling national-forest lands held as the Elliott State Forest — is constitutional. It does not violate Article VIII, section 5, and it does not violate the separation of powers. The State Land Board does not have a constitutional “core function” of generating the greatest net profit that overrides legislation about how Common School Lands are managed. The State Land Board’s powers and duties, the en banc court held (Nakamoto, J.), “shall be such as may be prescribed by law” — meaning by the legislature.
The case grew out of the 2013 sale of the 788-acre East Hakki Ridge parcel of the Elliott to Seneca Jones Timber Company. The State and Seneca Jones argued the legislature could not constitutionally limit the State Land Board’s discretion. The court disagreed.
How the State leans on Cascadia
The State’s MSJ treats Cascadia as a wholesale retirement of the strict-fiduciary reading the 1992 Frohnmayer opinion (Op 8223) had built into Oregon school-trust doctrine. On the State’s reading, Cascadia says: the legislature has broad authority over school lands; the State Land Board has no constitutional core function of maximizing revenue; therefore the legislative decisions OASTL challenges — the Sun Pass decertifications, the 1000 Road decoupling, the Elliott decoupling — are unreviewable policy choices.
That is the doctrinal door the State walked through. The reading is plausible if you stop where the State stops.
The sentence the State omits
But the Cascadia opinion does not stop where the State stops. Two paragraphs after the “no core-function” passage the State quotes, Justice Nakamoto adds the controlling qualifier:
“In some circumstances, the ‘greatest benefit’ mandate may require the State Land Board to maximize net profit, for example, by obtaining the best price for the authorized sale of timber on common school lands. But authority to ‘manage’ common school lands for ‘the greatest benefit for the people of this state’ does not mean that the State Land Board can disregard legislation reflecting the legislature’s determination about the best use of some common school lands in keeping with the state’s trust obligation.”
That last phrase — “in keeping with the state’s trust obligation” — is the load-bearing one. Cascadia did not abolish the State’s trust obligation over Common School Lands. Cascadia held that the legislature may direct how the State Land Board carries out that obligation. The trust obligation itself remains; it is precisely what 24CV38372 puts in issue.
The 2019 court also reaffirmed State Land Board v. Lee (1917) — that the State Land Board “exists for the sole purpose of serving the state” — and quoted Justice Powell’s Andrus v. Utah (1980) dissent on the original federal-state compact. A court that quotes those passages while resolving a Common School Lands case is not a court that has retired the trust framework. The State’s MSJ reads Cascadia as if it had. It did not.
The legal record
The active case is Advocates for School Trust Lands v. State of Oregon. On January 28, 2026, the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed dismissal and confirmed the standing of Oregon schoolchildren as beneficiaries entitled to enforce the trust. The case proceeds on the merits with Natalie Scott of The Scott Law Group as Lead Appellate Counsel.
Voices from the Trust
Three voices — a retired forest-products CEO, an emeritus OSU professor, and a forest historian — naming what the record shows.
“I was involved in the proposed sale of the Elliott State Forest a few years ago and could not believe… I suggest the establishment of the low value was politically motivated to allow for a cheaper decoupling.”
“I cannot think of a better example of ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ than the OSU [Elliott State Research Forest plan].”
The Historical Record
Two films — one national, one Utah-1990 — frame how school-trust lands are won, lost, and recovered.
A 12-minute film by Advocates for School Trust Lands. Features Dick Molpus (former Mississippi Secretary of State), Claire Orr (Colorado State Board of Education), Cathy Post (former Oklahoma State PTA President), and Margaret Bird (Utah Office of Education School Trust Lands Specialist).
Open on YouTube →A historical archive video showing how Utah’s school trust lands were misused and mismanaged, then reformed. Utah now has roughly $4 billion in its permanent school fund.
Open on YouTube →Testimony in the Record
Margaret Bird to the Oregon State Land Board, December 2022.
Submitted by OASTL board member Margaret Bird — economist and nationally recognized school trust lands expert — opposing the Elliott sale on trust-law grounds.
What recovery looks like
- Enforceable trustee duties. A judicial determination that the six duties are legally binding on the State as trustee — not optional, not aspirational.
- Transparent accounting. A public, auditable ledger that tracks where every dollar of Common School Fund income goes — and where it should have gone.
- Beneficiary-tracked distribution. Distribution mechanics designed so the schoolchildren who are the beneficiaries can see, year over year, what they received from the trust.
- Active management of the Elliott. Sustained yield and fire-resilience management of the Elliott State Forest, restoring its function as a working endowment for Oregon’s common schools.