Education Department provides $1 billion in funding for school mental health
“It’s amazingtransparent 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.
Republicans support these mental health benefits
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 Republican supporters of the law – John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina – in a 2024 view. “So we have laws in place to ensure teachers and administrators have tools for when they encounter 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,” said Mary Wall, who was in charge of 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 — in installments in the form of a five-year grant.
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 is done, he said: “We will eventually return to the two counselors in our area.”
The principal said he was “disgusted” at having to fire federally funded social workers.
“Can provide these [mental health] “It’s terrible to serve and then strip it of something completely out of control. My feelings for students are more important than anything because they won’t get the service they need,” Fialkiewicz said.
A poll from the American Psychiatric Association in August 2024 found that “84% of Americans believe that school staff play a crucial role in identifying signs of students’ mental health problems.”
Why the department says this cuts the grant
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 them to American families to ensure that tax payers’ funds support evidence-based practices that are truly focused on improving students’ mental health.”
But the 2022 federal grant notice clearly tells schools that the services provided must be “evidence-based on evidence.”
Wall also objected to the department’s characteristics, telling NPR: “The focus of these grants is definitely on providing evidence-based mental health support to students. Any advice that is any advice from the DEI program is a distraction to the real 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 threatened to withdraw federal funding from K-12 schools, and if they don’t stop all DEI programming and teaching the department might consider discriminatory.
In response to NPR’s request to further explain why the department believes that these mental health grants are somehow related to Trump’s anti-DEI policy, it provides a few brief summary of some grant applications, with one of the grantees writing that school counselors must be “recognized and challenged systematic incomprehensible, anti-toxicology, and support training in systematically supporting the white supercommunity.
Federal initial request for grant applications recommends districts prioritize “increasing the number of high-needed school mental health providers [districts]increase the number of service providers from different backgrounds or communities they serve, and ensure that all service providers are trained in inclusive practices. ”
In an email received by Fialkiewicz, informing him of the end of the grant, the department wrote that the grant funding efforts violated federal civil rights laws and “contradicted the department’s strengths, equity and education priority levels; undermining the welfare of students, these programs are designed to aid or constitute inappropriate 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 that because it’s part of what we’re going to use for fair recruitment practices. That’s exactly what we do. For me, fair recruitment practices mean that you hire the best jobs. It’s fair. It’s fair.”
