The U.S. 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.”
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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 U.S. 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, 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.
Republicans supported these mental health grants
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.
“The preparation of new mental health professionals, as well as those who are already in service, is at risk,” says Wall.
In Corbett, Fialkiewicz says he’s been told his grant money, which was supposed to last until December of 2027, will instead stop this December, two years early. Once it does, he says, “we’re gonna end up going back to having two counselors in our district.”
The superintendent says he feels “disgusted” by the idea of having to lay off those federally-funded social workers.
“To be able to provide those [mental health] services and then have it ripped away for something that is completely out of our control, it’s horrible,” Fialkiewicz says. “I feel for our students more than anything because they’re not gonna get the services that they need.”
An August 2024 poll from the American Psychiatric Association found that “84% of Americans believe school staff play a crucial role in identifying signs of mental health issues in students.”
Why the department says it cut the grants
In a statement to NPR, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Department of Education, explained the decision to discontinue the grants:
“Recipients used the funding to implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could hurt the very students the grants are supposed to help. We owe it to American families to ensure that tax-payer dollars are supporting evidence-based practices that are truly focused on improving students’ mental health.”
But the 2022 federal grant notice told schools explicitly: The services to be provided must be “evidence-based.”
Wall also disputes the department’s characterization, telling NPR “the focus of these grants was absolutely on providing evidence-based mental health support to students. Any suggestion that this is a DEI program is a distraction from the real issue.”
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.
In response to a request from NPR to further explain why the department believes these mental health grants had somehow run afoul of Trump’s anti-DEI policy, it offered a few brief excerpts from districts’ grant applications, in which one grantee wrote that school counselors must be trained “to recognize and challenge systemic injustices, antiracism, and the pervasiveness of white supremacy to ethically support diverse communities.”
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 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.
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