“It was amazing,” He says FialKiewicz about the difference that the federal money – and the social workers they paid – have made in their school community.
He says he was shocked when he heard that the Trump administration had put an end to this federal support. Exactly Tuesday, an employee of the US Department of Education, who controlled the grant, had given his area to add a text messaging service for students. An hour later, says FialKiewicz, he received an email that the grant would be terminated.
Republicans supported these grants for mental health
The Law on the more fascinating communities of the two -party and the funding for the mental health that accompanied him enjoyed considerable republican support even over the years after his passing.
“Too often, adolescents with untreated mental health states become the same perpetrators who commit acts of violence,” writes three of the Republican supporters of the law – SENS. John Cornin of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Tom Tilice of North Carolina – in Opinion piece 2024S “For this reason, we have created our law to ensure that teachers and administrators are equipped with tools to recognize when the student is experiencing a mental health crisis and, more importantly, to associate them with the care they need before it’s too late.”
The game is “to prepare and put 14,000 mental health specialists in schools,” says Mary Wall, who led the K-12 policy and budget for the US Department of Education during the Biden Administration.
Wall says about 260 school areas in almost every country have received part of $ 1 billion-on the form of five-year grants paid in installments.
Now it seems that these areas will have to find a way without the money they have planned but will not receive.
“The preparation of new mental health specialists, as well as those who are already in operation, is at risk,” says Wall.
In Corbett, Fialkevich says he was told that his grant money, which was supposed to continue until December 2027, would instead stop this December, two years earlier. After he does, he says, “We will return to two councilors in our area.”
The boss says he feels “disgusted” by the idea of having to release these federal social workers.
“To be able to provide these (mental health) services and then tear it apart for something that is completely beyond our control, it’s awful,” says Fialkevic. “I feel for our students more than anything because they will not receive the services they need.”
An Poll of August 2024 The American Psychiatric Association has found that “84% of Americans believe that school staff plays a decisive role in identifying signs of mental health problems in students.”
Why does the department say it has reduced the grant
In a statement to NPR, Madi Biederman, Deputy Secretary of Communications at the Ministry of Education, explained the decision to terminate the grants:
“The recipients used funding to apply racing actions such as giving quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could harm the students themselves who need to help. We owe it to US families to ensure that dollars of taxpayers are indeed.”
But 2022 Federal Notice of Grates Spoken to schools explicitly: the services to be provided must be “based on evidence”.
Wall also disputes the department’s characteristic, telling the NPR that “the focus of these grants is absolutely on the provision of a basis based on evidence of the mental health of students. Any suggestion that this is a DEI program is a distraction from the real problem.”
The Trump Administration and the Education Division apply a new interpretation of the Federal Civil Rights Act on a wide range of federal programs. Last month, the department threatened to cancel the federal funding of K-12 schools If they do not stop all programs and teaching of DEI that the department may consider discriminatory.
In response to a NPR request to explain further why the department believes that these grants for mental health have somehow struck Trump’s anti-de-de-dei policy, he proposed several brief excerpts from the applications for the regions in which a grantile man should be shown that schools should and the permeability of white supremacy in the public in the field and the penetration of the insight of white supremacy to support the clerks. “
The initial federal request for grant applications suggested that the areas prioritize “Increasing the number of mental health service providers based on schools, increasing the number of service providers of various origin or by the communities they serve, and to ensure that all service providers are trained in incorporation.
In the Fialkiewicz email, he received it, notifying it of the end of the grant, the department writes that the efforts funded by the gratuitous financial assistance violate the Federal Civil Rights Law “in conflict with the prioritization department of the merit, the justice and the high achievements in education help; or represent inappropriate use of federal means.
Asked if diversity plays a role in the grant application in his area, Fialkiewicz answered:
“Yes, we said in our app because it was part of the requirements that we would use fair hiring practices. And that’s exactly what we did. For me, fair hiring practices means hiring the best person to work. It’s fair.”
