The U.S. Department of Education told affected areas that the Biden administration violated the “letter or purpose of the federal civil rights law” when granting the grant. Jim Watson/Getty Images Closed subtitles
The Trump administration said it would no longer pay $1 billion to federal grants used by school districts across the country to hire mental health professionals, including counselors and social workers.
The U.S. Department of Education told affected areas that the Biden administration violated the “letter or purpose of the federal civil rights law” when granting the grant.
The grant is 2022 Two-Party Safer Community Law - A bill passed School shooting in UwaldIn Texas, a teenage gunman killed 19 elementary school students, two adults and 17 injured. The bill, among other things, will also invest federal funds into schools to resolve the issue Student mental health crisis.
The dollars helped the head of Derek Fialkiewicz in Cobbet, Oregon, more than the number of school mental health professionals in rural areas of 1,100 students east of Portland. Fialkiewicz said his area had only two counselors, “We realized that this is not sustainable for our students, especially from Covid. ”
In early 2023, the district received a federal grant due to the Bipartisan Safer Community Act that fully covers the salaries and benefits of five newly trained social workers.
“It’s amazing“ Fialkiewicz said the differences between federal funds and the social workers they pay for in his school community.
He said he was shocked when he heard that the Trump administration ended this federal support. Just Tuesday, a U.S. Department of Education employee who oversees his grants has given his district approval to add telemedicine text messages to students. Fialkiewicz said an hour later he received an email saying the grant would be terminated.
The bipartisan safer community bill and accompanying mental health funding have received considerable support from Republican support even over the past few years.
“Recently, teenagers with untreated mental health conditions become perpetrators of violence,” said three supporters of the Law Republican Party – John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom tillis of North Carolina – in 2024's opinion works. “So we have laws in place to ensure teachers and administrators have the tools to recognize when students are experiencing a mental health crisis and, more importantly, they connect them to the care they need before it’s too late.”
Mary Wall said the final game was “preparing and putting 14,000 mental health professionals in school,” who was responsible for the U.S. Department of Education’s K-12 policy and budget during the Biden administration.
Wall said about 260 school districts in almost every state received a portion of $1 billion, a five-year grant, instalments.
Now, it looks like these regions will have to find a way without plans but not receiving money.
"Preparing new mental health professionals, as well as those who have already served, are at risk," Wall said.
Fialkiewicz said in Corbett that he had been told that his grants should have lasted until December 2027, but would be suspended in December this year (two years early). Once that was done, he said: “We will eventually return to two counselors in our area.”
The principal said he was "disgusted" by the necessity to fire social workers who were funded by the federal government.
"It's terrible to be able to provide those (mental health) services and then deprive them of something completely out of control," Fialkiewicz said. "I feel more important to students than anything because they don't get the service they need."
one August 2024 Poll From the American Psychiatric Association, “84% of Americans believe that school staff play a crucial role in identifying signs of students’ mental health problems.”
Madi Biedermann, Deputy Deputy Minister of Communications of the Ministry of Education, explained the decision to terminate the grant in a statement to NPR:
“Recipients use this funding to implement race-based actions in ways that are not relevant to mental health, such as recruiting quotas, and may harm students whose grants are supposed to help. We owe American families to ensure that tax payers’ funds support evidence-based practices that truly focus on improving students’ mental health.”
but 2022 Federal Grant Notice Tell the school clearly that the services provided must be "evidence-based".
Wall also objected to the department’s characteristics and told NPR: “The focus of these grants is definitely on providing evidence-based mental health support to students. Any advice about this being a DEI program is a distraction to the actual problem.”
The Trump administration and education department have been applying new interpretations of federal civil rights laws to various federal programs. Last month, the department Threat to withdraw federal funds from K-12 schools If they do not stop all DEI programming and teaching, the department may consider discriminatory.
To respond to NPR's request to further explain why the department believes that these mental health grants are somehow comparable to Trump's anti-DEI policy, it provides some short excerpts from regional grant applications, in which one grantee wrote that school counselors must be trained to "recognize and challenge systemic incomprehensible, anti-pestism, anti-retrovirals, and support all-white performance.
The initial federal requirement for grant applications recommends “increasing the number of mental health providers in high demand (region) schools, increasing the number of providers from different backgrounds or communities they serve, and ensuring that all providers are trained in inclusive practices.”
In an email received by Fialkiewicz, the department received the end of the grant, which the department wrote that the grant funding efforts violated federal civil rights laws and “contradicted the department’s policies on the merits, equity and education excellence priorities; undermining the welfare of students, programs designed to aid or constitute an improper use of federal funds.”
When asked whether diversity plays any role in grant applications in their region, Fialkiewicz replied:
"Yes, in our app, we do state because this is part of what we will use to equitable hiring practices. That's exactly what we do. To me, equitable hiring practices means you hire the best jobs. It's fair."
And now, the social workers he hires may lose their jobs.