Federal Judge Tosses Bid to Cancel School Mental Health Grants | The Well News

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Seattle has blocked an effort by the Department of Education to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in previously approved grants intended to fund mental health programs in K-12 schools.

In a ruling handed down Friday, U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson said she found “serious, fundamental errors” in the procedure the department followed in cancelling the grants, adding that the effort “caused significant disruption to [plaintiff] states.”

“Allowing the discontinuation decisions to remain in place would be far more disruptive than setting them aside to allow the department to make lawful continuation determinations,” said Evanson, who was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden in 2023.

“Thus, the court will vacate the discontinuation notices and letters denying reconsideration that resulted from the directive procedure,” she added.

The ruling was a victory for the coalition of 16 states that sued the Department of Education in June, seeking to overturn what they deemed an “unlawful” bid by the Trump administration to dismantle the mental health program.

“This victory ensures that our young people are not unlawfully denied resources, including mental health professionals in schools, to help them navigate a nationwide mental health epidemic,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, one of the parties to the lawsuit, in a written statement.

“This ruling is yet another reminder that the Trump administration cannot arbitrarily revoke grant funding, especially funding that provides essential services to our vulnerable young people, just because they don’t like the programs,” she said.

The other states involved in the litigation were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.

The programs subject to the administration’s planned cuts were part of a series of initiatives Congress put in place after the 2018 shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

In the wake of that incident, Congress created the Mental Health Professional Demonstration Grant Program, appropriating $10 million so that public schools across the nation could hire more mental health professionals.

Shortly thereafter, President Trump, then in his first term, established a Federal Commission on School Safety to make recommendations on how to better protect the nation’s public school children, teachers and other staffers.

Noting the lack of access to mental health professionals in high-poverty districts and schools where needs are the greatest, this commission made a series of recommendations, including expanding access to mental health care services in schools.

The next fiscal year (2020) Congress appropriated $410 million to establish a new departmental initiative, the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program, to “increase the number of qualified, well-trained … mental health professionals that provide school-based mental health services to students.”

In 2021, Congress maintained its funding for the Mental Health Professional Demonstration Grant Program at $10 million, but increased funding for the School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program to $11 million.

In fiscal year 2022, the appropriations for the MHSP jumped to $55 million and for SBMH to $56 million.

Despite the dramatic increase in funding, gun violence continued to be a dark blight on the nation’s public schools.

In May 2022, a former student shot and killed 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

In response, Congress once again dramatically increased the funding for both programs, appropriating an additional $100 million per year for each program for fiscal years 2022 through 2026 through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

At the same time, the Department of Education began awarding grants that would span a five-year project period, with yearly decisions made on whether to continue each grant’s funding.

It based those decisions on grantee’s performance, as required by the laws that established the programs.

According to the attorneys general who sued the Education Department, the nearly $1 billion in bipartisan appropriations helped school districts across the nation hire approximately 14,000 mental health professionals, many of them in districts serving low-income and rural communities.

As a result, the attorneys general said, nearly 775,000 K-12 students were able to benefit from mental and behavioral health services in the first year of funding, and wait times were reduced dramatically for students hoping to receive help.

Then in February, a week after Trump began his second term, the Education Department’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development issued a “directive of grant priorities” calling for a review of all new and issued grants based on the new administration’s policies.

Then on April 29, the department sent a notice to almost all of the MHSP/SBMH grantees, telling them their grants no longer aligned with White House priorities and that their funding would be discontinued as of Dec. 31.

The coalition of attorneys general from 16 states filed their lawsuit on June 30, claiming the department’s actions were arbitrary and capricious and that they violated the Administrative Procedure Act as well as the Constitution’s Spending Clause and Separation of Powers.

Judge Evanson granted the states’ motion for a preliminary injunction, enjoining enforcement of the decision to cancel the grants until she decided on both sides’ motion to dismiss the case.

In her ruling of Dec. 19, Evanson came down firmly on the side of the states, vacating the department’s actions and granting both injunctive and declaratory relief to the attorneys general.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and on X @DanMcCue