When Ian Levy secured a $3.3 million federal grant last fall, he expected to have five years to train 30 new school counselors who would go on to work in high-need New Jersey school districts.
By the end, he thought he’d have a group of counselors working in schools across the state where he could send future counselor trainees for hands-on training.
But less than a year into the project, Levy is preparing to wind down much of the work to boost the number of counselors and the profession’s diversity. Instead of lasting five years, the funding for the initiative will end after one, on Dec. 31, after the Trump administration pulled the plug earlier this year.
The first 10 trainees are completing a year of coursework and were preparing to start working in schools next semester to gain on-the-job experience. Now, whether they’ll be able to do that without the financial assistance from the grant is in doubt, not to mention Levy’s ability to train two more groups of 10 future counselors each over the next four years. (The grant was to fully cover trainees’ tuition.)
“The grant funding would have ended in five years, but the work of the grant would have lived well beyond the period, in that there would be folks carrying out the mission, and then they would multiply over time,” said Levy, an assistant professor of school counseling at Rutgers University Graduate School of Education.
The funding for the Rutgers initiative came from a $1 billion infusion in school mental health services that Congress passed in 2022 following the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It enabled more than 300 projects across the country, allowing schools to hire mental health professionals and universities to train future mental health professionals to work in schools. Recipients of the funding had five years to do their work.
But Levy and his Rutgers University colleagues were among 223 grantees who received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education in late April, three months into the new Trump administration, saying their grant-funded work reflected Biden administration priorities and was “inconsistent” with “the best interest of the federal government.”
Funding would end Dec. 31, the notice advised.
The news came as a disappointing surprise to the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative, which had recently begun the third year of its five-year grant. The organization has been working with nine rural and suburban school districts in north-central Kentucky to hire school counselors and support them so they’ll stay in the profession.
The newly hired counselors “really became our mental health special forces in our districts, and then to be told that it’s not in the best interest of our government to fund it was very frustrating,” said Jason Adkins, the cooperative’s CEO.
Since the April notices, grant recipients on the chopping block have scrambled to preserve their funding. More than 80% filed appeals with the Education Department, urging the agency to reconsider the terminations. Some asked members of Congress for help. The grant terminations have been the subject of at least four legal challenges.
Some grantees held out hope that they could win back some funding when the Trump administration launched a redesigned competition for the remaining mental health funds in late September.
In the end, few, if any, appeals to the Education Department appear to have been successful. But one lawsuit resulted in a judge’s order that has preserved funding for 49 grantees—for now, at least, as the Trump administration has pledged to appeal.
That leaves up to 174 initiatives to boost the availability of in-school mental health services and the ranks of hard-to-recruit school mental health professionals facing the end of their funding in a few weeks.
The Education Department terminated the grants because the Biden administration awarded them under “deeply flawed priorities” and grantees were using the funds to “implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas,” a spokesperson said earlier this year. (The Biden administration required applicants to show how their initiatives would boost the diversity of school-based mental health professionals and the number who come from the communities they’re serving.)
Terminating multiyear grants before the end of the grant period has been rare until this year under the Trump administration. Administration lawyers have argued in court that grantees shouldn’t have relied on their funding continuing from one year to the next and that the cancellations were the result of an “individualized review” that resulted in the termination of two-thirds of the awards.
The department didn’t answer questions from Education Week about the number of successful appeals nor about how much funding remains available to devote to new grants given that it now must continue funding 49 grantees under the federal court order. But a spokesperson said the agency plans to award those new grants by the end of the year.
Even if grantees manage to preserve their funding or secure new federal funds to continue their work, the disruption itself has done damage, said Sharon Hoover, a former co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health and a professor emeritus of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“There are certainly questions about whether this has destabilized the school mental health workforce pipeline,” said Hoover, who described the experience for grant recipients since April as a “roller coaster.”
The experience of having grant funding abruptly stopped could influence how potential grantees react to future school mental health funding opportunities from the federal government, Hoover said. And it could discourage prospective school mental health professionals from signing up to participate in federally funded initiatives.
“Who’s to say that there’s not going to be another executive order discontinuation of grant funds?” she said.
Schools saw a chance to make a dent in the need for mental health services
The $1 billion infusion of federal funds for school mental health services came amid a decadelong decline in students’ mental health exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and long-running shortages of school counselors, school psychologists, social workers, and other school-based mental health professionals.
“What was transformative about this funding was the amount—it was just the largest investment that we had seen—and the fact that it was so widespread in terms of the number of states and local districts that were able to access the funds and tailor them really for improving their school mental health systems,” Hoover said.
The funding went to two grant programs—one to help schools hire and retain mental health professionals and the other to train future school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and school-based clinicians. Some 339 entities—a mix of school districts, multidistrict partnerships, state education departments, and universities—received awards.
In New Jersey, Levy saw the grant he secured as an opportunity to make a dent in a long-running shortage of school counselors.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 1 counselor for every 250 students, but that figure nationwide stood at 376 students per counselor during the 2023-24 school year, according to the association. In New Jersey, it was 298 to 1.
“The addition of 30 school counselors over the five-year period, deployed across the state, would have a positive impact on reducing that ratio,” Levy said.
The grant also offered the chance to partner with four local districts in need of added mental health services and to train a new generation of school counselors in methods better suited to the diverse student populations they would be serving.
Much of the school counselor role is focused on working with the entire student population to help students feel connected to and safe at school and prevent serious behavior problems and the need for more intensive mental health services, Levy said. Counselors might work with a class of 9th graders to help them acclimate to high school or with elementary school students on social skills and emotional regulation. They might form connections with community groups to enhance after-school programming.
These strategies “don’t sound like counseling, but what they do is they create an ecosystem where students feel heard and supported and seen, and their families are involved and their communities involved,” Levy said.
That preventative focus has also been a key priority for the Ohio Valley cooperative in Kentucky. Using its $5.2 million, five-year grant, it’s hired 11 school counselors and paid their salaries, provided them with small retention stipends and tuition assistance, guaranteed they can spend most of their time working directly with students rather than on administrative tasks, and supported their professional development. The counselors have also served as liaisons between school districts and area mental health providers who treat students.
As the five years drew to a close, the cooperative planned to work with the participating districts to incorporate the counselors into their budgets long term. It’s also taken steps to secure Medicaid reimbursement for services provided by school counselors, as another funding source to sustain their positions.
But with funding expiring Dec. 31, not every district will be able to keep the newly hired counselors after this school year, said Santina Plottner, the cooperative’s director of school-based mental health services.
Already, five of the 11 have left the program since the Education Department denied the cooperative’s appeal to reinstate funding in late August. With one counselor hired since then to fill a vacancy, the districts are down to seven new counselors, Plottner said.
Participating counselors described their grant-funded jobs as a “dream position,” Plottner said. Schools were noticing a reduced need among students for higher-level mental health services because of the counselors’ preventative work, she said.
“I just feel like the impact has been so large it was really disappointing” to see the funding end years early, Plottner said.
The Education Department’s letter denying the cooperative’s appeal quoted passages from the original grant application mentioning diversity, equity, and inclusion—statements that its “hiring practices are intended to promote equitable opportunity,” that the organization’s DEI coordinator would review interview questions, and that counselors would participate in a DEI training offered by Cornell University.
Adkins said the organization tried to recruit a diverse pool of candidates to reflect the students they’d serve and it made its hires based on merit. In addition, the group later decided against using the Cornell training—something Plottner had noted in a grant progress report for the department.
“We had a really rigorous process and we tried to include that in our appeal, and it seemed as if it had not been considered,” he said.
Trump administration is scrubbing initiatives it says promote DEI
The mental health grants were an early example of the Trump administration’s attempts to eradicate federally funded initiatives from the Education Department and other agencies that it claimed were promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Since discontinuing the mental health awards, the department has done the same for hundreds of other competitive grant awards—for special education projects, teacher preparation, and more—citing passages in grantees’ applications emphasizing what the administration considers to be DEI.
In rural Northern California, the McKinleyville Union school district sued the federal agency after it denied its appeal to reinstate the $7.2 million, five-year award it had secured with two nearby districts just last year.
In the first year of the grant, the districts have used the money to add a mental health clinician at each school who works with students on campus, so families don’t have to drive miles away to see the nearest specialist, said Julie Giannini-Previde, McKinleyville’s superintendent.
They’ve also added a coach in each district who helps teachers use a tiered support system to boost students’ mental health and emotional needs.
The award prioritized hiring mental health professionals who reflected the districts’ student population, which includes a large number of Native American students.
“The idea that we have clinicians on campus who kids see themselves in is so important and just means so much,” she said. “The idea that we wouldn’t do that, it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
For now, McKinleyville still has its award, as it’s one of the 49 grant recipients whose funding has been preserved by a court order. But it’s still far from certain the districts will retain their funding, as the court order is only temporary and the Trump administration plans to appeal.
In New Jersey, Levy said he and his colleagues are looking into alternative funding sources to keep their initiative going.
And in Kentucky, the Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative is covering the counselors’ salaries out of its own budget until the end of this school year, said Adkins, the CEO.
It’s also applied for funding under the Trump administration’s redesigned mental health grant competition—but those grants will provide funding only for school psychologists, so the cooperative wouldn’t be able to use it to continue paying for counselors.
The group included a letter of support from Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in its latest grant application.
After the previous grant’s termination, Adkins said, “we hope that his support gets us a fair review of our application.”
2025-12-02 19:32:40
Source link