A federal judge in Seattle says the Trump administration can’t move ahead with the termination of about four dozen grants in 15 states meant to expand mental health services in schools and bolster the ranks of school mental health professionals.
Judge Kymberly Evanson ruled Oct. 27 that the U.S. Department of Education likely violated federal law when it issued notices in late April telling the grant recipients that their multiyear awards would end years early because they reflected Biden administration priorities.
Funding for most grants, made before President Donald Trump took office in January, was set to end Dec. 31 under the termination notices.
But in discontinuing the awards, the Education Department didn’t meet its obligations under the federal Administrative Procedure Act, according to Evanson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden. The termination notices contained no individualized reasoning on why the department was stopping the funding, the judge ruled, nor how the awards conflicted with Trump administration priorities.
The terminations are also causing real harm, Evanson asserted. Even though the dollars won’t stop flowing until the end of the year, state education departments, universities, and school districts that received the funding are already winding down their grant-funded work, which has paid for school counselors, psychologists, and social workers, and placed graduate students in training for those roles in high-need schools.
Evanson’s order comes in response to a June 30 lawsuit from 16 states, all with Democratic attorneys general.
Her order is a preliminary injunction that will stop the terminations, at least in their current form, while the case continues in federal court.
It will also stop the Education Department from awarding the funds for the approximately four dozen affected grantees through its restructured competition for mental health grants that it launched in late September, just before the government shutdown. Applications for those awards are due Oct. 29.
While the states participating in the lawsuit sought to stop all mental health grant terminations within their borders, Evanson decided to halt the terminations only for the approximately four dozen grantees in 15 of the 16 states that submitted declarations in court outlining how they’re hurt by losing the grant funding.
“It’s a relief to students and their families that a large number of these programs are shielded for now,” Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, who led the lawsuit, said in a statement.
The affected grantees include six state education departments, several school districts including Los Angeles Unified, and a number of universities.
A spokesperson for the federal Education Department said the agency intends to appeal Evanson’s ruling, saying it “stands by our grant decisions.”
“Our new competition is strengthening the mental health grant programs in contrast to the Biden administration’s approach that used these programs to promote divisive ideologies based on race and sex,” the spokesperson said.
The states that sued are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin. However, Nevada has no grants affected by Evanson’s order.
The grants were a response to major school shootings
The federal government awarded the funds under the School-Based Mental Health Services and Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration grant programs. Lawmakers created both during the first Trump administration following the high-profile 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and the Education Department gave out the inaugural awards during Trump’s first term.
Congress then provided $1 billion for the programs through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that passed in 2022 after the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The School-Based Mental Health Services grant helps districts recruit and retain mental health professionals while the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration grant focuses on training future mental health professionals who can work in schools.
The Biden administration awarded both types of grants in 2022 and 2024, with grantees commonly receiving five-year awards.
While the department disbursed one year of funding at a time, grantees had little reason to believe their awards would be prematurely discontinued when they were due for a new round of funding, they said in court filings. Typically, such terminations are rare and only related to misconduct.
But the Trump administration and Education Department have increasingly turned to that tactic in recent months, stopping in-progress, competitive grants—many of which the president proposes to end in his 2026 budget—when their annual funding cycle ends. This fall, the Education Department has discontinued funding for hundreds of competitive grants paying for special education teacher training, college preparation for low-income students, and more.
With the mental health grants, the administration over the summer issued new priorities for grantees before inviting new applications in late September.
Gone was the Biden-era preference for applicants who proposed to increase the diversity of mental health professionals and the number who come from the communities they’d be serving.
Grantees will now be prohibited from using their awards for “gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races.”
The reworked grants also focus exclusively on boosting the ranks of school psychologists rather than a full spectrum of mental health professionals that also includes school counselors and social workers.
The mental health grant terminations have drawn at least two other lawsuits.
In one case, a judge over the summer dismissed the Silver Consolidated schools’ lawsuit, saying the New Mexico district should have sued in Federal Claims Court, which hears contract-related cases brought against the U.S. government, instead of trial court. Silver Consolidated won’t benefit from Evanson’s latest ruling.
A second district, McKinleyville Union in California, sued Oct. 22 over the loss of its award. That case is pending, but Evanson’s ruling will apply to McKinleyville in the meantime.
