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 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.”
