Judge orders Trump administration to restore school mental health grants

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funding for grants that are meant to bolster school-based mental health care and were created in response to the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

The Education Department in April began cutting more than $1 billion in congressionally approved grants that fund counseling for students and help remove financial barriers for people seeking to become school psychologists. Federal education officials said the funding was being used to try to diversify the pool of psychologists; President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January calling for the end of programs that foster diversity, equity and inclusion.

In June, 16 states, including Illinois, sued the Education Department, calling the cuts unconstitutional and arguing that the money should be restored after Congress approved the spending. Judge Kymberly K. Evanson for the Western District of Washington state agreed in her Monday injunction.

“Congress created these programs to address the states’ need for school-based mental health services in their schools, and has repeatedly reaffirmed the need for those services over the years,” Evanson wrote.

Evanson added that the cuts removed mental health resources from students in rural and underserved areas, triggered layoffs, and caused “a steep decline” in graduate student retention at programs funded by the grants.

The Education Department on Tuesday defended the cuts and vowed to appeal.

“The Department stands by our grant decisions,” the agency said in a statement, adding, “Our new competition is strengthening the mental health grant programs in contrast to the Biden administration’s approach that used these programs to promote divisive ideologies based on race and sex.”

Without the injunction, the funds might have been lost. The government had already started accepting applications that would be judged using the administration’s new anti-DEI guidelines, Evanson wrote.

Research shows that students of color are more likely to seek out or engage with counselors who have similar backgrounds.

The affected grants were part of a bill passed by Congress with bipartisan support in 2022 that strengthened some gun-control laws and allocated more than $1 billion for school-based mental health programs. The legislation was passed in response to a gunman killing 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde one month earlier.

According to the lawsuit, grant-funded projects in the 16 suing states provided mental and behavioral health services to almost 775,000 elementary and secondary students. The grants’ cancellation caused chaos in schools across the country, from 3,000 students in rural New York losing access to mental health services to funding cuts for 19 school-based mental health professionals in northwestern Washington state, according to the lawsuit.

New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote in a news release Monday that the judge’s order is “a victory for our young people, and for every educator working to keep our schools safe and supportive,” adding that $7.6 million in grant funds will be restored in her state.

Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy at the National Association of School Psychologists, said that such grants “have proven essential in addressing nationwide shortages of school psychologists and other school mental health professionals.”

“These programs are helping schools meet students’ mental and behavioral health needs all across the U.S., and the court’s decision is a win for children, families and educators across the country,” she said.

Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann previously said that some 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.”

Evanson, the judge, ordered the government to send a status report within 48 hours detailing what it has done to comply with the injunction.

The states suing the Trump administration were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.