“It has been incredible” Fialkiewicz says of the difference that federal money, and the social workers they paid, have done in their school community.
He says he was surprised when he heard the Trump administration was ending this federal support. Just on Tuesday, an employee of the United States Department of Education who excessive his subsidy had given his district the approval to add a Telesalud text messages for students. An hour later, says Fialkiewicz, received an email that the subsidy would be discontinued.
Republicans supported mental health subsidies thesis
The Safer Safer Bipartisan Communities Law, and mental health financing that accompanied him, enjoyed considerable republican support in the years after approval.
“Too often, adolescents with unreasonable mental health conditions become the same perpetrators who commit acts of violence,” wrote a law of republican supporters of the law, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins de Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, in North Carolina. An opinion article of 2024. “For this reason, we elaborate our law to ensure that teachers and administrators are equipped with the tools to recognize when a student experiences a mental health crisis and, more importantly, connect them with the attention they need in the event that it is too late.”
The end of the game was “preparing and placing 14,000 mental health professionals in schools,” says Mary Wall, who supervised the K-12 policy and budget for the United States Department of Education during the Biden Administration.
Wall says that some 260 school districts in almost all states received a part of the $ 1 billion in the form of five -year subsidies, which were paid in installments.
Now, it seems that these districts will have to find a way to do it without the money they had planned but that they will not recover.
“The preparation of new mental health professionals, as well as those who are already in service, is at risk,” says Wall.
In Corbett, Fialkiewicz says they have been told that his subsidy money, which would be supposed to last until December or 2027, will stop in December, two years before. Once he does, he says: “We will end up having two directors in our district.”
The Superintendent says that he feels “disgusted” by the idea of having to fire those social workers financed by the federal government.
“To be able to provide those [mental health] Services and then scammed for something that is completely out of our control, it’s horrible, “says Fialkiewicz.” I feel for our students more than anything that does not obtain the services they need. “
Antecedent August 2024 Survey The American Psychiatry Association discovered that “84% of Americans believe that school staff plays a crucial role to identify signs of mental health problems in students.”
Why the department says they cut the subsidies
In a statement to NPR, Madi Biedermann, Deputy Secretary of Communications of the Department of Education, explained the decision to suspend subsidies:
“The recipients used financing to implement breed -based actions, such as recruiting quotas so that it has nothing to do with mental health and could damage the same students who are supposed to help. We owe US families to ensure that the dollars of tax payers support practices based on evidence that really focus on improving the mental health of students.”
But the Federal Grant Notice 2022 Schools explicitly told him: services to be provident must be “evidence based.”
Wall also disputes the characterization of the departments, NPR says that “the focus of these subsidies was absolutely in providing mental health support based on evidence to students. Any suggestion that is a program Dei is a distraction of the real problem.”
The Trump Administration and the Department of Education have been applying a new interpretation of the Federal Civil Rights Law to a wide range of federal programs. Last month, the department Threatened to revoke the federal financing of K-12 schools If they do not stop all the programming and teaching of DEI, the department could consider discriminatory.
In response to an NPR application to explain even more why the department believes that these mental health subsidies had been included in some way in Trump’s anti-Dei policy, offered some brief extracts of the requests for subsidies of the districts, in which a concessionaire wrote that school counselo White Supreme Court to the various communities of ethical support to various communities “”. “
The initial federal application for requests for subsidies suggested that the districts prioritize “to increase the number of mental health services suppliers based on the school in high need [districts]Increasing the number of service providers of various origins or the communities they serve, and ensuring that all service providers are trained in inclusive practices. “
In the email that Fialkiewicz received, notifying him about the end of the subsidy, the department wrote that the efforts funded by the subsidy violate the Federal Civil Rights Law, “the conflict with the policy of the department to prioritize merit, equity and excellence in education; they undermine the well -being of students that these programs are intended to help;
When asked if diversity played any role in the request for subsidy of his district, Fialkiewicz replied:
“Yes, in our application, we declared, because it was part of the applications, that we would use equitable hiring practices. And that is exactly what we did. And for me, equitable hiring practices means that it hires the best the best.” “