“It was incredible,“” Said Fialkiewicz of the difference that federal money – and social workers who have paid – have done in his school community.
He said he was shocked when he heard that the Trump administration ended this federal support. On Tuesday, an employee of the American Ministry of Education who oversees his subsidy had given his district the green light to add a texture service of Télésanté to students. An hour later, says Fialkiewicz, he received an email that the subsidy was interrupted.
Republicans supported these mental health subsidies
The Bipartisan SAFER Communities Act, and the financing of mental health which accompanied it, benefited from considerable republican support even in the years that followed.
“Too often, adolescents suffering from unrealized mental health problems become the same authors who commit acts of violence,” wrote three of the republican supporters of the law. John Cornyn of Texas, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina – in an opinion piece in 2024. “For this reason, we have developed our law to ensure that teachers and administrators are equipped with tools to recognize when a student knows a mental health crisis and, more importantly, connect them to the care he needs before it is too late.”
The end of the game was “to prepare and place 14,000 mental health professionals in schools”, explains Mary Wall, who supervised kindergarten policy and budget for the United States Ministry of Education during the Biden administration.
Wall says that around 260 school districts in almost all states have received part of the billions of dollars – in the form of five -year subsidies, which have been paid into several payments.
Now it seems that these districts will have to find a way to do without the money for which they had planned but will not receive.
“The preparation of new mental health professionals, as well as those who are already in service, are in danger,” explains Wall.
In Corbett, Fialkiewicz said he was told that his subsidy act, which was to last until December 2027, will stop in December, two years earlier. Once this is the case, he says: “We are going to end up returning to two advisers in our district.”
The superintendent says that he feels “disgusted” by the idea of having to dismiss these social workers funded by the federal government.
“To be able to provide these services (mental health), then torn it out for something that is completely out of our control, it’s horrible,” explains Fialkiewicz. “I feel for our students more than anything, because they will not get the services they need.”
A August 2024 survey of the American Psychiatric Association revealed that “84% of Americans think that school staff play a crucial role in identifying signs of mental health problems in students”.
Why the department says that it cut the subsidies
In a statement at NPR, Madi Biedermann, assistant communications assistant secretary at the Ministry of Education, explained the decision to arrest subsidies:
“The recipients have used funding to implement actions based on breed as well as the recruitment of quotas in a way that has nothing to do with mental health and could harm students even that subsidies are supposed to help. We owe American families to ensure that taxpayers’ dollars support practices based on evidence that is really focused on improving the mental health of students. ”
But the opinion of federal subsidy of 2022 explicitly declared to schools: the services to be provided must be “based on evidence”.
Wall also disputes the characterization of the department, saying at NPR that “the objective of these subsidies was absolutely to provide support on mental health based on evidence to students. Any suggestion that this is a DEI program is a distraction of the real problem. ”
The Trump Administration and the Department of Education applied a new interpretation of the Federal Civil Rights Act to a wide range of federal programs. Last month, the ministry threatened to revoke federal funding for kindergarten schools to the 12th year if they do not stop all the programs and lessons that the ministry could consider discriminatory.
In response to an NPR request to explain more why the ministry considers that these mental health subsidies had somehow noted Trump’s anti-DEC policy, he offered some brief extracts from the requests for subsidies from the districts, in which a concessionaire wrote that school advisers must be trained “to recognize and contest systemic injustices, anti-utilization communities and permeation White supreme to ethically support various communities. ”
The first federal request for subsidy requests suggested that districts prioritize “the increase in the number of mental health service providers in high school needs (districts), increasing the number of service providers from various horizons or communities they serve and ensuring that all service providers are trained in inclusive practices.”
In the e-mail that Fialkiewicz received, informing him of the end of the grant, the ministry wrote that the efforts financed by the subsidy violent the federal law on civil rights, “the conflict with the policy of the department of prioritization of merit, equity and excellence in education; undermines the well-being of students. “
When asked if diversity had played a role in the subsidy request for his district, Fialkiewicz replied:
“Yes, in our candidacy, we said, because it was part of the requirements, that we would use fair job practices. And that’s exactly what we did. And for me, fair job practices mean that you hire the best person for work. It’s equitable. “
