WASHINGTON – The Trump administration abruptly cancelled roughly $1 billion in federal grants aimed at helping schools hire and train therapists.
Hundreds of funding recipients across the country received letters April 29 from the U.S. Department of Education informing them that their mental health programs violated civil rights laws.
Some constituted an “inappropriate use of federal funds,” according to the letter.
“The grant is therefore inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, the best interest of the Federal Government and will not be continued,” says the letter, which was signed by Murray Bessette, a senior advisor at the Education Department.
The Trump administration confirmed April 30 that it discontinued $1 billion in grants that supported school-based mental health programs. The grants ran afoul of their intended purpose, said Madi Biedermann, a spokesperson for the Education Department, and were part of the “deeply flawed priorities of the Biden administration.”
Specifically, the Trump administration took issue with programs for educating mental health professionals about systemic racism and training therapists to focus on race-related stress and trauma, among other things.
“We owe it to American families to ensure that taxpayer dollars are supporting evidence-based practices that are truly focused on improving students’ mental health,” Biedermann said in a statement.
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An April 29 notice from the Education Department’s office of legislative affairs says the agency “plans to re-envision and re-compete its mental health program funds to more effectively support students’ behavioral health needs.”
The grants were funded through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a landmark gun safety law passed in the wake of a massacre three years ago in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 elementary school students and two teachers dead.
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Mental health advocates denounced the cuts. Nancy Duchesneau, an education researcher at EdTrust, a left-leaning advocacy group, called the cancellations “irresponsible and cruel.”
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, warned that “school shootings will only multiply” if student mental health programs are wiped away.
“Really? Does this administration have to impose its ideological whims on everything?” she said in a statement, adding, “even, apparently, on bipartisan grants passed after the murder of students and educators in a school shooting.”
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump administration cancels $1B in mental health grants for schools
