Some of ASTL’s Advocacy Accomplishments

Training:

Holding an annual conference to educate thousands of education leaders that “School Lands” are not “State Lands” and must be held in trust solely for schools. ASTL helped several states create advocacy groups to address issues in their states.
Advocates for School Trust Lands has presented to the Colorado State Board of Education; State Treasurers in Oregon and Colorado; Senate, House and the Governor in Minnesota; the Conference of State Governments West; the Conference of Western Attorney Generals; NEA regional meetings; lots of state PTAs; and the National Association of School Boards of Education.

CLASS informed education leaders in Colorado that three bills were filed in Congress to take the granted school lands away from the school beneficiaries and make them state lands. The Colorado education community went to work and killed all three bills.
Marguerite Herman wrote a passionate opinion piece supporting schools when the Wyoming Land Board determined a wind farm could be placed on private ground but not on the intermingled school lands, denying the schools the income to please some people’s viewshed. The decision was reversed at the next Land Board meeting.
ASTL has filed a lawsuit in Montana to prevent the legislature from giving away water rights that are currently used on school lands. This suit is ongoing.
Tim Donaldson successfully lobbied full market value payment of $1.8 million annually for hunting on school trust lands. Past payments had been only a fraction of full market value
Nevada ASTL members are now working actively to recover the 4 million acres they were shorted at statehood by Congress.

Oklahoma PTA President Cathy Post prevented a $5 million loss to their trust when the Land Board planned to refund grazing lease money to ranchers due to drought conditions by requesting an Attorney General opinion on the action which was determined to be illegal.
Tim Donaldson asked the Utah State Board of Education to create a task force that included professionals and legislators to best assure professional investment of the State School Fund, leading to the creation of the School and Institutional Trust Fund Office and Board of Trustees. In the ensuing six years, the Utah State School Fund has grown from $1 billion to almost $4 billion.

Denise Dittrich of Minnesota was successful in creating a separate office within the Department of Natural Resources to manage the school trust lands. She also created special legislative committees to provide oversight on the lands and funds.
Margaret Bird and former Speaker Mel Brown in Utah were successful in getting legislation passed to create an office to advocate and protect trust interests in Utah. Leaders of the Utah School Board Association (USBA), Utah PTA and the Utah Education Association (UEA) joined them in supporting legislation to direct investment income to every school for academic programs.
Four members active in CLASS were appointed to state committees and task forces to help with decisions on trust land management (Renate Witte in New Mexico, Quentin Goodrich in Washington, Diana Oberbarnscheidt with the Orgon PTA, and Marguerite Herman in Wyoming).