Park City Schools to Receive $1 Million from School LAND Trust Fund

On Jan. 5, Park City School District was awarded approximately $1 million from the School LAND Trust Fund for the 2026 funding cycle, an increase of about $168,600 over last year’s allocation. The supplemental dollars come from the state-managed School LAND Trust Fund, which channels revenues from state land holdings into local education budgets.

The School LAND Trust Fund is designed to support local classroom needs by returning earnings from state land revenues to school districts. For the Park City School District, that means the new funds will be applied to classroom priorities determined at the school level as well as districtwide priorities identified by district administrators. Individual schools set their own priorities and submit plans that guide how their share of the Trust dollars will be spent.

Distribution of the funds follows an established procedural path: schools identify classroom-level needs and priorities, the district compiles and allocates the Trust resources, and program spending is tracked and reported back through the district’s oversight process. Those reporting steps are intended to provide transparency and accountability, documenting how Trust revenue is used to support students and classroom programs.

For local residents, the increase represents a modest but meaningful boost to school operating capacity at a time when discretionary classroom funding is limited. Because the Trust is aimed specifically at classroom priorities, the money can be directed to instructional materials, classroom support, technology upgrades, or other school-identified needs that principals and school teams prioritize. The funding mechanism also keeps decisionmaking largely local, allowing individual schools to target resources to the most pressing classroom needs they have identified.

The district will now move forward with finalizing school plans and the schedule for distributing the funds. Schools are required to report on their program spending to ensure the Trust dollars are used as intended, and those reports will inform future allocations and community oversight.

As the district implements the 2026 School LAND Trust allocations, residents and local stakeholders will want to track how schools translate the added revenue into classroom improvements and whether the reporting process provides clear, accessible information about outcomes. The Trust’s structure — state land revenues returned to local schools with school-driven spending priorities and district-level reporting — reinforces local control while requiring accountability for public funds.