US Education Department stops $1 billion in funding for school mental health

TAM Desk ||

The Trump administration says it will stop paying out $1 billion in federal grants that school districts across the country have been using to hire mental health professionals, including counselors and social workers.

The US 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.”

President Donald Trump signs an executive order regarding education in the Oval Office April 23, with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Education Secretary Linda McMahon

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 two adults and injured 17 people. 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 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and the mental health funding that accompanied it, enjoyed considerable Republican support even in the years after it passed.

“Too often, adolescents with untreated mental health conditions become the very same perpetrators who commit acts of violence,” wrote three of the law’s Republican supporters — Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — in a 2024 opinion piece. “For this reason, we crafted our law to ensure teachers and administrators are equipped with the tools to recognize when a student is experiencing a mental health crisis and, more importantly, connect them with the care they need before it’s too late.”

The endgame was “to prepare and place 14,000 mental health professionals in schools,” says Mary Wall, who oversaw K-12 policy and budget for the U.S. Department of Education during the Biden administration.

Wall says about 260 school districts in nearly every state received a portion of the $1 billion — in the form of five-year grants, which were paid out in installments.

Now, it appears those districts will have to find a way to do without the money they had planned for but will not receive.