The U.S. Department of Education is kicking off two grant competitions to boost mental health services in schools, nearly five months after the agency abruptly told former grantees their awards would end because they reflected Biden administration priorities.
But while the agency is devoting $270 million to resurrect the grant programs, it’s changed their emphasis to focus solely on boosting the ranks of school psychologists, and it’s eliminated a Biden-era emphasis on boosting the diversity of mental health professionals working in schools.
The application period for the School-Based Mental Health Services and Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration grant programs officially opens Sept. 29, according to notices the department published in the Federal Register.
The agency anticipates giving out awards that last up to four years.
Both programs aim to boost the ranks of mental health professionals working in schools, but one—the School-Based Mental Health Services program—focuses on helping school districts recruit and retain those professionals while the other focuses on training future school psychologists.
The grants’ new emphases come after the Trump administration ended previous rounds of awards, claiming in April that the mental health grants given out by the Biden administration helped grantees “implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas.”
Gone is the Biden-era preference for applicants who present plans to increase the diversity of mental health professionals and the number who come from the communities the district is serving.
The Trump administration’s solicitations state instead that grantees are prohibited from using their awards for “gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races.”
The latest grant competitions also differ from previous rounds of awards—including those given out in the first Trump administration—in their emphasis on boosting the ranks of school psychologists rather than a full spectrum of mental health professionals that also includes school counselors and social workers.
Another key difference is that colleges and universities are no longer eligible to apply for the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration grant, the award program focused on training school psychologists.
Only state departments of education, school districts, and groups of school districts can apply, though they’d have to form partnerships, often with universities, “to train school psychology graduate candidates and place them into participating high-need” school districts.
School psychologist emphasis comes at expense of schoolwide focus, some say
In response to public comments suggesting the Education Department expand its focus beyond school psychologists, the agency said psychologists are best-suited to provide early intervention and intensive mental health services to students.
School psychologists “are trained to both assess and identify students with the greatest mental and behavioral health needs and provide targeted services to address those needs and re-engage students in learning,” the department said.
But the original idea behind the grant programs years ago was to ease shortages of all types of school-based mental health professionals, said Angela Hickman, director of research and marketing for the American School Counselors Association.
“Nothing has changed about those needs,” Hickman said.
And the exclusive focus on school psychologists could come at the expense of expanding schools’ ability to serve students with less intensive needs and developing schoolwide programming aimed at all students, she said.
“School mental health is usually a multi-disciplinary effort that doesn’t just fall under the umbrella of school psychologists,” 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.
“And I think most school psychologists would agree that their job is made easier and better when they are at the table with multiple professionals.”
Kelly Vallaincourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists, said the group welcomes the funding to address school psychologist shortages “so that more of them are available to collaborate with students and families and other school mental health professionals.”
Many school psychologists spend much of their time testing students as part of determining which special education services they need, Vallaincourt Strobach said. When there are more of them—the school psychologists association encourages a ratio of 500 students to one psychologist, which few schools currently meet—they have more time to provide a broader range of services and help more students.
In response to comments suggesting that colleges and universities be allowed to apply for training funds, the Education Department said state education departments and school districts were the appropriate recipients because the agency “is committed to returning education to the states.”
But it’s almost always universities providing the training, Hoover said, so requiring that state education departments or local school districts with limited grant-writing capacity take the lead on grant applications could simply create more bureaucracy.
“I think it’s critical that the state department of ed. is at that table helping shape what’s happening in their schools,” she said.
Plus, within six months of receiving the grant award, recipients would have to establish partnerships, likely with universities, to train psychologists.
“I just think it creates a bit of a challenge for those who are providing the education to school psychologists and other mental health professionals to have to wait to establish the [memorandum of understanding],” Hoover said. “But it’s not unsurpassable.”
Some commenters suggested the department not award mental health services grants at all and instead focus solely on academic achievement initiatives.
But the Education Department said it was carrying out the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the 2022 legislation that funded the grants, and that it “recognizes the connection between mental health and learning.”
Grant competition comes at an uncertain time for Ed. Dept. grantees
The Trump administration is pledging to award grants at an otherwise uncertain time for recipients of competitive Education Department grants. The administration in recent months has discontinued more than 200 separate grants across 16 different programs, cutting those multi-year projects short.
In addition, the administration canceled another grant program entirely, aimed at promoting desegregation efforts, and said it would devote the remaining funds to the mental health grant programs.
The spring discontinuation of the mental health grants prompted a lawsuit in late June from 16 Democratic-led states, which argued that the action had caused layoffs and dried up scholarships for college students. Their lawsuit is still pending.
At least one school district, the Silver Consolidated district in New Mexico, also sued on its own to contest its loss of a mental health services grant. But a federal judge dismissed that lawsuit, saying the district should have sued in Federal Claims Court, which hears contract-related cases brought against the U.S. government.
