A 167-year-old promise to Oregon's schoolchildren.
Oregon received school trust lands at statehood. The promise was simple: manage the land and its money for public schools, forever.
- Statehood
- Feb 14, 1859
- Original grant
- ~3.4M acres
- Trustee
- State Land Board
- Audited fund
- $2.585B
- FY2025 schools
- $76.8M
A gift, with one condition.
When Oregon became a state on February 14, 1859, the federal government gave it land: two square miles out of every thirty-six, in a grid laid across the state, roughly 3.4 million acres in all.
The gift came with one condition. The land, and the money it ever earned, belonged to Oregon's public schools. Not to the legislature. Not to state agencies. To the schools, permanently.
Twenty states still hold school trust lands today. Oregon is one of them.
Oregon is not the owner free and clear. Oregon is the trustee.
A trust is one of the oldest ideas in law. One party holds and manages property for another. The manager is the trustee; the people meant to benefit are the beneficiaries.
For Oregon's school trust, the trustee is the State Land Board: the Governor, the Secretary of State, and the State Treasurer. The beneficiaries are Oregon's schoolchildren: the ones in classrooms today, and every class that will follow them.
A trustee may not use trust property for itself, let the property sit idle, sell it cheap, or hide the books. The trustee must act loyally, prudently, and openly for the beneficiary.
Read the six trustee duties on the Legal Desk →The fund still pays every district, every year.
Most of the original land was sold in the 1800s. The proceeds went into the Common School Fund, a permanent endowment the Oregon Constitution calls "separate and irreducible."
The fund's audited balance was $2,585,199,612 as of June 30, 2025. In fiscal year 2025, it distributed $76.8 million to all 197 Oregon school districts, about $147 per student.
That money arrives in good budgets and bad because the endowment is permanent. The remaining trust land, above all the Elliott State Forest assembled for the schools in 1930, is the working heart of what survives.
Two short films show the national story and the proof that reform works.
A Birthright Forever
Advocates for School Trust Lands' 12-minute film on where school trust lands came from, how states lost or kept them, and what a well-run trust does for children.
A Matter of Trust
A 1990 archive film on Utah's school trust lands before reform. Utah rebuilt its system; its permanent school fund has since grown to roughly $4 billion.