The United States Ministry of Education has declared to the impacted districts that the Biden administration, in granting subsidies, violated “the letter or the objective of the federal law on civil rights”.
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Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration indicates that it will stop paying $ 1 billion in federal subsidies that school districts across the country have used to hire mental health professionals, including advisers and social workers.
The United States Ministry of Education has declared to the impacted districts that the Biden administration, in granting subsidies, violated “the letter or the objective of the federal law on civil rights”.
The subsidies were part of the 2022 Law on safer bipartite communities – a bill was adopted the day after the School shooting in UvaldeTexas, in which a teenage shooter killed 19 primary students and two adults and injured 17 people. The bill, among others, has paid federal dollars to schools to respond to increasing concerns concerning a Student mental health crisis.
These dollars helped Superintendent Derek Fialkiewicz in Corbett, Oregon, more than triple the number of school mental health professionals in his largely rural district of 1,100 students east of Portland. Before the subsidies, Fialkiewicz says that his district had only two advisers, “and we realized, it is simply not durable for our students and especially by leaving COVI. “”
At the beginning of 2023, thanks to the safer bipartite communities law, the district received a federal subsidy which fully covered the wages and the advantages of five new trained social workers.
“It was incredible,“” Said Fialkiewicz of the difference that federal money – and social workers who have paid – have done in his school community.
He said he was shocked when he heard that the Trump administration ended this federal support. On Tuesday, an employee of the American Ministry of Education who oversees his subsidy had given his district the green light to add a texture service of Télésanté to students. An hour later, says Fialkiewicz, he received an email that the subsidy was interrupted.
Republicans supported these mental health subsidies
The Bipartisan SAFER Communities Act, and the financing of mental health which accompanied it, benefited from considerable republican support even in the years that followed.
“Too often, adolescents with unrealized mental health problems become the same authors who commit acts of violence,” wrote three of the republican supporters of the law. John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis from Caroline du Nord – An opinion piece in 2024. “For this reason, we have developed our law to ensure that teachers and administrators are equipped with tools to recognize when a student knows a mental health crisis and, more importantly, connect them to the care they need before it is too late.”
The end of the game was “to prepare and place 14,000 mental health professionals in schools”, explains Mary Wall, who supervised kindergarten policy and budget for the United States Ministry of Education during the Biden administration.
Wall says that around 260 school districts in almost all states have received part of the billions of dollars – in the form of five -year subsidies, which have been paid into several payments.
Now it seems that these districts will have to find a way to do without the money for which they had planned but will not receive.
“The preparation of new mental health professionals, as well as those who are already in service, is in danger,” explains Wall.
In Corbett, Fialkiewicz said he was told that his subsidy act, which was to last until December 2027, will stop in December, two years earlier. Once this is the case, he says: “We will end up returning to two advisers in our district.”
The superintendent says that he feels “disgusted” by the idea of having to dismiss these social workers funded by the federal government.
“To be able to provide these services (mental health), then torn it out for something that is completely out of our control, it’s horrible,” said Fialkiewicz. “I feel for our students more than anything because they will not get the services they need.”
A August 2024 survey From the American Psychiatric Association revealed that “84% of Americans believe that school staff play a crucial role in identifying signs of mental health problems in students”.
Why the department says that it cut the subsidies
In a statement at NPR, Madi Biedermann, assistant communications assistant secretary at the Ministry of Education, explained the decision to arrest subsidies:
“The recipients have used funding to implement actions based on breed such as quota recruitment in a way that has nothing to do with mental health and could harm students even that subsidies are supposed to help. We owe American families to ensure that taxpayers’ dollars support practices based on evidence that is really focused on improving the mental health of students.”
But the 2022 Federal grant notice Explicitly said to schools: the services to be provided must be “based on evidence”.
Wall also challenges the characterization of the department, saying that “the objective of these subsidies was absolutely to provide support for mental health based on evidence to students. Any suggestion that this is a program of I is a distraction of the real problem”.
The Trump Administration and the Department of Education applied a new interpretation of the Federal Civil Rights Act to a wide range of federal programs. Last month, the department threatened to revoke federal funding for K-12 schools If they do not stop all the programs and teaching of I, the ministry could consider discriminatory.
In response to an NPR request to explain more why the ministry considers that these mental health subsidies had somehow noted Trump’s anti-DEC policy, he offered some brief extracts from the requests for district subsidies, in which a concessionaire wrote that school advisers must be trained “to recognize and challenge systemic injustices, anti-production communities.
The first federal request for subsidy requests suggested that the districts hierarchire “the increase in the number of mental health service providers in high school needs (districts), increasing the number of service providers from various horizons or communities that they serve and ensuring that all service providers are trained in inclusive practices.”
In the email that Fialkiewicz received, informing him of the end of the subsidy, the ministry wrote that the efforts financed by the subsidy violates the federal law on civil rights, “the conflict with the policy of the ministry to prioritize merit, equity and excellence in education; undermine the well-being of students.”
When asked if diversity had played a role in the subsidy request for his district, Fialkiewicz replied:
“Yes, in our candidacy, we said, because it was part of the requirements, that we would use fair job practices. And that’s exactly what we have done. And for me, fair job practices mean that you hire the best person for work. It is fair.”
And now social workers he has hired could lose their jobs.