Giving Compass' Take:
- Nadia Tamez-Robledo reports on how recent cuts to school mental health programs and resources are likely to impact rural communities more.
- As a donor, how can you advocate for increasing the amount of mental health providers and resources for youth in your community?
- Learn more about key issues in education and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on education in your area.
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In Nebraska, it’s trauma-informed training to support Native American students. In Arizona, it’s an effort to expand existing school mental health services. In a Texas region with high suicide rates, it’s a program to increase the number of mental health providers.
These are among the school mental health programs that could be on the chopping block thanks to Department of Education funding cuts.
Shrinking or losing these programs could be especially significant for school districts in rural areas, where mental health resources are more scarce and the need is higher than in urban hubs.
Many parts of the country are mental health care “deserts.” If schools in those communities don’t provide this kind of support, children there are unlikely to be able to get it anywhere else, says David M. Ardrey, interim executive director at the National Rural Education Association.
“Many mental health services that existed in rural places, those had already gone away, either by virtue of a business model [that] didn't make sense, or they went away because federal money went somewhere else,” he says.
Cuts to School Mental Health Resources at a Difficult Time
In a letter sent last week, a Department of Education official said grants would be terminated at the end of their funding cycle unless recipients filed an appeal. The move is widely credited to the Trump administration taking issue with the fact that many of the grant proposals mentioned increasing diversity among mental health professionals.
The nearly $1 billion infusion of funding for K-12 school mental health services and care providers started in 2022, the same year that a panel of medical experts made the unprecedented recommendation that primary care doctors screen all children 8 and older for anxiety.
The Department of Education’s decision to cut the flow of mental health grant funding is reverberating around the country, but they may hit rural schools particularly hard.
Read the full article about cuts to school mental health programs by Nadia Tamez-Robledo at EdSurge.