Nearly 140 school districts, universities, and state departments of education now have a chance to hold onto federal grants for school mental health services that the Trump administration cut off earlier this year.
But the grant recipients are still on edge just days before their funding has been set to run out. That’s because Trump administration officials now must make a new round of project-by-project decisions by Tuesday, Dec. 30, on whether to keep money flowing for the mental health initiatives for another year.
The shred of hope for the grantees has come from two federal court orders, issued Dec. 19 and Dec. 23, in a lawsuit launched by 16 states to challenge the April termination of dozens of five-year grants around the country designed to boost the ranks of school mental health professionals and train future specialists to work in schools.
What did the judge’s orders on mental health projects do?
On Dec. 19, Seattle-based Judge Kymberly Evanson ruled that the U.S. Department of Education violated federal law when it informed grant recipients that their funding would end Dec. 31 because their work reflected Biden administration priorities and was now “inconsistent” with “the best interest of the federal government.”
The notices, all with uniform language, contained no individualized explanation for the terminations, Evanson noted, nor did the Education Department give grantees any notice that it had set new priorities for the funding—a requirement for any competitive grant application.
“The department essentially—and surreptitiously—ran a new grant contest evaluating existing original grant applications against new unpublished priorities,” Evanson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote in her 36-page order.
For many grantees, the termination notices came just months after they began their work, effectively cutting off what they expected to be five-year projects after a single year. For others, the notices came at the start of the third year of their five-year projects.
Before this administration, such midproject terminations had been rare and only related to grantee misconduct. But the Trump administration has canceled in-progress, competitive grants throughout the year, often claiming they advance diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that the administration says are illegal.
The grantees all received funding after showing that their projects would fulfill Biden administration priorities that included boosting the diversity of school-based mental health professionals and the number who came from the communities they’re serving.
While those aren’t Trump administration priorities, Evanson disagreed that it had the authority to discontinue multiyear grants for that reason.
“Nothing in the existing regulatory scheme comports with the department’s view that multi-year grants may be discontinued whenever the political will to do so arises,” she wrote.
Evanson threw out the Education Department’s April terminations and told the agency to make new project-by-project decisions on whether to continue funding in 2026 based on legally acceptable criteria—mainly, whether grantees have submitted required reports and made progress toward completing their projects.
In a subsequent order, Evanson said the department must make those decisions by Dec. 30.
An Education Department spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it could make those decisions in time.
Who’s affected by the latest order?
Evanson’s order applies to 138 grantees in 15 of the 16 states that sued, expanding the reach of an order she issued in October that temporarily preserved funding for 49 projects in those states.
The grantees received awards under two programs created during the first Trump administration following the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla.—one to help schools hire and retain mental health professionals and the other to train future school counselors, psychologists, social workers, and school-based clinicians.
Some 339 entities across the country—a mix of school districts, multidistrict partnerships, state education departments, and universities—received awards from the Biden administration after Congress devoted $1 billion to those programs in 2022 following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
The Education Department then cut off funding for 223 of those awards in late April, according to court filings.
Evanson’s order applies to terminated grant recipients from the states that sued—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin. However, Nevada has no affected grants, according to Evanson’s order.
Why are mental health grantees still on edge?
The termination notices for those 138 grant recipients are no longer valid, but the grantees still have no guarantee of continuing to receive funding for their school mental health initiatives past Dec. 31.
While the Education Department can’t cut off grants the way it did in April, it could still come up with new justifications to stop funding for some or all of the projects, all while following Evanson’s court order.
And the decisions will come down to the wire.
The University of Washington, for example, had been using grant funding to cover tuition for graduate students training to become school psychologists. Tuition payments for the new semester are due Jan. 9, according to court filings, and the participating students still don’t know whether their tuition will be covered.
With a lapse in grant funding, “the students likely will pause their training … or drop out because they can’t afford to cover the tuition,” a university official said in a court filing.
Is there enough money to keep these mental health grants in place?
There’s also uncertainty about whether the Education Department still has enough money to continue paying for these 138 projects if it decides to keep their funding in place for some or all of them.
That’s because when it canceled grants in April, the Trump administration said it planned to devote the freed-up money to a new school mental health grant competition of its own—based on its own policy priorities (funding for school psychologists only and no other types of mental health professionals and prohibiting grantees using their awards for “gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races”).
When the Education Department launched the competition in late September, it estimated it would award $270 million. Ultimately, it awarded $208 million when it announced a new set of grantees in mid-December. Plus, the department might have to continue funding for some or all of the 138 projects covered by the lawsuit.
But Congress hasn’t yet appropriated all those funds, according to lawyers for the states that sued, meaning the projects will depend on Congress deciding in the future to set aside funding for them.
Lawyers for the states requested a full accounting for more clarity on the funding situation, but Evanson hasn’t yet ordered that. The Education Department didn’t respond to a request for clarification on available funding.