A federal appeals court has temporarily kept grant funding in place for 49 projects designed to boost school mental health services and train new specialists to work in schools.
But the temporary relief, the result of the court’s decision last week, doesn’t end the uncertainty for those grant recipients in 15 states who have been scrambling to preserve their federal funding ever since the Trump administration last spring told them it would end. Plus, it brings some new uncertainty for another set of school districts and states that have been hoping for federal money to support their own initiatives to hire and train school psychologists.
Those districts and states have been expecting to learn by the end of this year whether their grant applications have been approved.
Now, it’s unclear how much money the U.S. Department of Education will ultimately award—and the department has raised doubts in a court filing about its ability to issue new grant awards by the end of the year if it has to keep funding the 49 projects whose funding is protected for now.
Here’s why there’s uncertainty for both sets of school mental health projects and how they got to this point.
Trump administration pulled the plug on school mental health grants
The Dec. 4 opinion from a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest development in a seven-month saga that began when the Education Department in April informed more than 200 recipients of previously awarded grant funding that their projects to expand school mental health services reflected Biden administration priorities and that the Trump administration would stop funding them effective Dec. 31.
Since then, the affected grant recipients have scrambled to preserve their funding for work that was in progress or just getting off the ground. 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 also been the subject of at least four legal challenges.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration pledged to redistribute the funding it had yanked, launching its own revised grant competition, with narrower priorities, in late September. It said it would award the money by the end of the year—the deadline for committing the money before it would have to return to the U.S. Treasury unspent.
But legal challenges were proceeding in the background while the administration prepared its new grant competition—which will only pay for projects to boost the numbers of school psychologists rather than the full range of mental health professionals allowed by the initial grants and will abandon the Biden administration’s emphasis on diversifying the profession and recruiting professionals from the communities they’d be serving.
In one lawsuit, 16 states with Democratic attorneys general sued in late June over the surprise grant cancellations, which, in many cases, came just months into the five-year projects they were funding. (Congress provided $1 billion for more than 300 school mental health projects as part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, following the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.)
In late October, the Seattle-based judge considering that case, Kymberly Evanson, sided with the 16 states and agreed the termination notices the Trump administration sent in April were likely invalid. Her order blocked the notices for 49 grantees out of the 223 nationwide whose projects the administration said it would end.
The Trump administration appealed about two weeks later, hoping a higher court would block Evanson’s order.
Even as it remains in effect, Evanson’s order leaves the door open for the Trump administration to issue new cancellation notices for the 49 affected projects. What the judge took issue with was that the initial notices, which all had the same wording, contained no individualized reasoning on why the department was stopping the funding nor how the awards conflicted with Trump administration priorities.
The department could still reissue customized cancellation notices by Dec. 31 under the court order.
“I would hope that they comply with the order and look at these grants individually and carefully to make a determination that they should continue, and if not, that they would allocate this funding as Congress has directed them to, to new grantees,” said Amanda Miller, who oversaw higher education grantmaking at the Education Department during the Biden administration and has recently been working with grantees on recouping their funding cut by the Trump administration.
The Education Department hasn’t said how much school mental health grant funding remains available, but estimated in September it would issue $270 million in new awards for the school psychologist projects.
If it terminates the 49 grants affected by the multistate lawsuit, more of that funding would be available for new awards. If those 49 grantees retain their funding, that means less funding for the new grant competition.
The situation is “just adding another layer of confusion” for the states, school districts, and universities using these mental health services grants in a year that’s already been dominated by uncertainty for their projects, said Kelly Vallaincourt Strobach, the director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists.
“I feel for these districts,” she said. “They’re trying to plan. They’re staring down Dec. 31,” when their funding could end.
Education Department raises doubts about awarding new grants
The Department of Education confirmed to Education Week as recently as Nov. 17 that it would award grants in the new competition by the end of the year. But administration lawyers just days earlier, on Nov. 14, said in a filing with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that, if Evanson’s order remained in place, it wouldn’t “reasonably be able to make new grant awards under the recent competition by the end of the year.”
An Education Department spokesperson didn’t respond to multiple requests from Education Week late last week and on Monday seeking clarity on whether it would award funding in the school psychologist grant competition by Dec. 31 even though the appeals court hadn’t ruled in the department’s favor.
In its eight-page opinion ruling against the department, the three appeals court judges from the 9th Circuit rejected the agency’s argument that it needed to immediately discontinue funding for the 49 projects preserved by Evanson’s order.
The three-judge panel noted that the legal challenge is on its way to a quick resolution this month and that, even if legal proceedings continued past Dec. 31—the deadline for committing the money to specific projects—a court could order that the funds remain available for school mental health initiatives beyond that date.
