Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.
Schools will likely have to lay off social workers and counselors, and college programs designed to train mental health providers may shut down after the Trump administration decided it would stop funding grants created under a bipartisan law passed in response to mass school shootings.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act came on the heels of the devastating 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 elementary schoolers and two teachers. Gun control remains a deeply divisive issue, but Democrats and Republicans agreed: Schools should get more money to address students’ mental health needs. They set aside $1 billion to do that.
When it came time to distribute that money, the Biden administration gave applicants the option to show how they planned to diversify the mental health profession and prepare educators to work with kids from diverse backgrounds — in a bid to help students who often have higher needs but struggle to access care outside of school. Now schools that tailored their proposals to meet that criteria appear to be among those losing their funding.
“The Department has determined these grantees are violating the letter or purpose of 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,” Brandy Brown, the deputy assistant secretary for K-12 education, wrote in a Tuesday night email to members of Congress.
The Education Department has the authority to stop funding multi-year grant recipients, but it rarely does so.
The state education agencies in Colorado, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin were among the grantees that lost their funding. So did the San Diego County Office of Education, Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska, and Teachers College at Columbia University, which was supporting efforts in New York City schools.
“Grant 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,” Madi Biedermann, an Education Department spokesperson, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat.
The Trump administration is objecting, in particular, to the Biden administration’s decision to give schools more points on their grant application if they planned to increase the number of mental health staffers from diverse backgrounds or who were from the communities where they’d be working with kids. The federal notice didn’t say what counted as “diverse,” and it noted that any hiring strategies used by schools had to follow federal civil rights laws.
“We were not there to say that this meant there had to be any type of racial quotas, or it had to be along the lines or race, or ability, or language,” said Mary Wall, who until January served as the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for P-12 education. “We simply said it would be wise and we encourage applicants to make hires of school-based mental health professionals that are reflective of the communities that they’re serving.”
Many schools expected to get three or four more years of funding, but now the grants will run out in December. Wall said schools were well on their way to hitting the goal of hiring and training 14,000 mental health professionals, but these cuts put that at risk.
“Not giving grant continuations has an extreme impact on whether or not the work can continue,” she said.
That’s already happening in some places. Teachers College had begun training five graduate students to provide mental health services in schools, and was preparing to send offer letters to eight more when the college found out it had lost its $4.9 million five-year grant. The Trump administration ended it back in March when it terminated $400 million in funding for Columbia University.
Those trainees, many of whom were bilingual or first-generation college students who couldn’t otherwise afford graduate school were slated to work in high-need schools in Harlem and East Harlem — parts of New York City where many newly arrived immigrants live and families often struggle to find stable housing. Now, schools won’t get the year of free services those trainees were going to provide, such as therapy and parent training. And there will be gaps in the future pipeline, too.
“We were going to be producing professionals who would be working in these settings delivering school-based mental health services for years to come, ideally their entire careers,” said Prerna Arora, an associate professor of psychology and education at Teachers College who was overseeing the grant. “We are in desperate need of these types of professionals.”
Cuts to mental health grants part of anti-DEI push
The cuts appear to be part of the Trump administration’s broader attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and exemplify how the administration is using the Supreme Court’s ruling that barred affirmative action in higher education to target a much wider set of DEI practices in K-12 schools.
Already, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal education funding from states that won’t sign off on its contested interpretation of what constitutes racial discrimination under federal civil rights law — a policy that’s currently on hold as several legal challenges work their way through the courts.
The Trump administration is investigating Chicago Public Schools for launching a Black student success plan and has sought to dismantle other practices, such as forming staff affinity groups based on race or allowing college students to participate in separate graduation ceremonies that celebrate their race or heritage.
It is unclear exactly how many of the 265 grantees listed on the Education Department’s website lost their funding and how much money was clawed back. On Thursday, an Education Department spokesperson said they could not provide a list of which school districts, states, or colleges lost their funding.
The Education Department told members of Congress that the terminated grants were worth $1 billion, but that is almost certainly an overestimate, Wall said, as many grantees had already spent a chunk of their money. The grants paid for 1,500 to 2,000 new mental health providers to work in schools across the U.S. in the first year alone, Wall said.
It also appears some schools kept their grants. The Indiana Department of Education, Fort Wayne Community Schools in Indiana, and Normal Public Schools in Oklahoma all told Chalkbeat they hadn’t been contacted about changes to their funding.
The pandemic helped bring the need for more school-based mental health workers into sharp relief as many schools saw a spike in children experiencing depression, anxiety, or other kinds of stress. So did the many unaddressed warning signs exhibited by the teenage gunman in Uvalde, who spoke often of violence and targeted the classroom where he was once bullied. That, and similar cases in other school shootings, led Congress to invest in mental health staff as a school safety measure.
With the help of federal COVID relief funds, many schools launched teletherapy services to address in-person staff shortages and to connect kids with bilingual therapists, male counselors, or mental health workers of color — who are often in especially short supply, but can form close connections with kids who look like them or who faced similar challenges growing up.
While there isn’t much research on the effects of pairing school-based mental health workers with kids of similar backgrounds, “we do know in research outside of the school environment that it’s actually really beneficial for students of color to have therapists or mental health supports from folks within their own communities,” said Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate who studies children’s social and emotional well-being at the nonprofit EdTrust.
“If you have students of color in a school, you really do want adults in the building — teachers, school counselors, mental health supports — who are of the same race and ethnicity to be able to better understand where students are coming from and make sure that the interventions or supports that they receive are not based on bias, but are truly based upon the needs of the students,” Duchesneau said.
Chris Rufo, the influential conservative activist, was the first to publicize the mental health grant cuts, the Associated Press reported. Rufo’s social media posts have prompted the Trump administration to cancel other education spending.
This time, Rufo posted examples from the grant proposals on the social media site X that he said were being used to “advance left-wing racialism and discrimination.” The Education Department pointed to some of those same examples when explaining what it found objectionable about the grants.
One grantee planned to hire 24 new school counselors and set a goal for eight to be people of color, an Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat. Other grantees said they would train therapists to address racial trauma or help mental health workers use a “critical compassion perspective,” instead of a colorblind perspective that assumes race and skin color don’t matter.
Another grantee wrote that they were training the next generation of school counselors “to recognize and challenge systemic injustices, antiracism, and the pervasiveness of white supremacy.”
State officials condemn — and applaud — the cuts
Some officials agreed with the move. In a statement, Ryan Walters, the superintendent of Oklahoma’s schools, said he applauded the Trump administration for “taking bold action to eliminate these misguided programs.” Oklahoma had planned to spend $1.9 million a year to help teachers, community members, and clinicians get retrained to work as mental health staff in schools before the state lost its funding.
“These grants were never about addressing real mental health needs, they were about pushing a political agenda into our classrooms,” Walters said in the statement, adding that his education agency was “forced” to apply for the money by state lawmakers. “We made our opposition clear then, and we stand by it today.”
Other state officials condemned the cuts. In Colorado, Jeremy Meyer, a spokesperson for the state’s education agency, said the state was “deeply disappointed” by the Trump administration’s decision to end Colorado’s grant, which was expected to total $7.5 million over five years.
Now the state will get just $1.5 million. The state was still rolling out its program to help schools recruit and retrain mental health staff so “no funds had yet been distributed to the field,” Meyer wrote.
Jill Underly, Wisconsin’s state superintendent, said in a news release that the decision to eliminate $8 million of the state’s planned $10 million grant was “indefensible” at a time “when communities are urgently asking for help.”
Already, she wrote, the federal grant had helped Wisconsin schools hire an additional 350 mental health staffers and helped enroll 500 new graduate students in the University of Wisconsin’s certification program.
“Kids don’t get a chance to do-over their school experience while the federal government recalibrates its political agenda,” Underly wrote. “These disruptions need to stop.”
Chalkbeat’s New York bureau chief Amy Zimmer contributed reporting.
Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.
