Education Department Halts Mental Health Funding

The Trump administration says it will stop paying out $1 billion in federal grants that school districts across the country have been using for student mental health funding, including to hire mental health professionals like counselors and social workers. The Department of Education is telling impacted districts that the Biden administration, in awarding the grants, violated “the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law.” The grants were part of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — a bill passed in the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which a teen gunman killed 19 elementary school students and 2 adults and injured 17 people total. The bill, among other things, poured federal dollars into schools to address rising concerns about a student mental health crisis.

Those dollars helped Superintendent Derek Fialkiewicz in Corbett, Ore., more than triple the number of school mental health professionals in his largely rural district of 1,100 students east of Portland. Before the grants, Fialkiewicz says his district had just two counselors, “and we realized, that’s just not sustainable for our students and especially coming out of COVID.” In early 2023, thanks to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the district received a federal grant that fully covered the salaries and benefits of five new trained social workers.

“It’s been amazing,” says Fialkiewicz of the difference that federal money — and the social workers it paid for — have made in his school community. He says he was shocked when he heard the Trump administration was putting an end to this federal support. Just Tuesday, a U.S. Department of Education employee who oversees their grant had given his district the go-ahead to add a telehealth texting service for students. An hour later, Fialkiewicz says, he got an email that the grant would be discontinued.

The Trump administration and the Education Department have been applying a new interpretation of federal civil rights law to a wide range of federal programs. Last month, the department threatened to revoke K-12 schools’ federal funding if they don’t stop all DEI programming and teaching that the department might consider discriminatory. The initial federal request for grant applications suggested districts prioritize “increasing the number of school-based mental health services providers in high-need [districts], increasing the number of services providers from diverse backgrounds or from the communities they serve, and ensuring that all services providers are trained in inclusive practices.”

In the email Fialkiewicz received, notifying him of the mental health funding grant’s end, the department wrote that the efforts funded by the grant violate federal civil rights law, “conflict with the Department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education; undermine the well-being of the students these programs are intended to help; or constitute an inappropriate use of federal funds.”

When asked if diversity played any role in his district’s grant application, Fialkiewicz replied, “Yes, in our application, we did state, because it was part of the requirements, that we would use equitable hiring practices. And that’s exactly what we did. And to me, equitable hiring practices means you hire the best person for the job. That’s equitable.” And now, those social workers he hired might lose their jobs.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services