West Contra Costa Unified School District administration building.
Credit: Louis Freedberg / EdSource
TOP TAKEAWAYS
- West Contra Costa Unified anticipates it will receive only about $600,000 of $4.2 million it was awarded last year.
- The cut is part of a big push by the Trump administration to roll back or eliminate funding to support student mental health in schools across the nation.
- The district was one of only three school districts in California to be awarded grants from the Mental Health Professional Services program
The West Contra Costa Unified School District is the latest school district in California to feel the direct impact of the Trump Administration’s elimination of a range of grant programs approved by the U.S. Dept. of Education during the Biden administration.
At its meeting on Wednesday night, Interim Superintendent Kim Moses told board members, who were caught unawares by the news, that she had received a letter the previous day from the Dept. of Education indicating that the five-year, $4.2 million grant awarded last fall will be cut to one year.
The letter stated that the grant was no longer “aligned with the current goals of the administration,” she said.
As a result of the cut, the district anticipates it will only receive about $600,000 of the funds it was expecting, all of which must be spent between August and December of this year.
Board president Leslie Reckler summarized her reaction in two words: “Total bummer.”
The district was one of three in California to receive a five-year grant last fall. They were among 46 grants awarded last year under the Mental Health Services Professional Grant program begun by the Biden Administration.
The grant was supposed to enable the San Francisco Bay Area district to address the mental health needs of its students by placing graduate student counseling interns in its schools, in collaboration with San Jose State University and St. Mary’s College in Oakland.
The goal of the program, as described in the Federal Register, is “to support and demonstrate innovative partnerships to train school-based mental health services providers.”
Moses said she was taken aback by the news of the drastic reduction. “Of all the things that I am worrying about being reduced or taken away, I didn’t have this grant in mind,” she said in an interview after the meeting. “The grant is to build our workforce (of mental health workers). How could building our workforce and supporting students with their mental health needs be against what the administration stands for?”
School board member Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy described the funding cut as “atrocious.” “This is just another way they (the Trump administration) are going to start hurting our kids, our staff, our school district, because of what we stand for, because of what we look like.”
The drastic grant cutback comes as a blow to the district, which has made significant progress over the past year in cutting major budget deficits and averting the prospect of a state takeover. Especially since the pandemic, educators have realized that addressing the mental health needs of students is essential to their ultimate academic success. A particular challenge has been to boost the number of school mental health professionals, especially those reflecting the backgrounds of students.
The reduction appears to be part of an aggressive drive by the administration to eliminate mental health programs serving schools. On the same day West Contra Costa heard about its grant reduction, the Associated Press reported that the U.S. Department of Education is moving to terminate $1 billion in mental health grants to schools, signed into law by President Biden after the school shooting massacre in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.
The district applied for the funds in the spring of 2024 and was awarded them in the fall. It had been working on signing a Memorandum of Understanding to begin implementing the program this fall.
The funds were designated to be spent in “high-need” school districts like West Contra Costa Unified, where nearly two-thirds of its almost 30,000 students qualify for free and reduced-price meals.
Program probably targeted because of emphasis on diversity
What almost certainly caught the Trump administration’s eye was the emphasis on diversity in the grant application guidelines, a term the current government is using as a rationale to cut federal funds to education institutions at all levels.
One of the goals of the program, according to the guidelines, is to “increase the number and diversity of high-quality, trained providers available to address the shortages of mental health services professionals in schools served by high-need districts.”
The mental health professionals serving students in those districts, according to the guidelines, “should reflect the communities, identities, races, ethnicities, abilities, and cultures of the students in the high-need districts, including underserved students.”
“We considered appealing, but the reality is that they just erased this whole grant, and everybody is in the same boat,” interim Supt. Moses said. “This isn’t a case of ‘we picked on you because you’re doing something wrong, we picked on you because the grant is going away.’”
Looking forward, board member Gonzalez-Hoy said, “We must just continue to reassure our students that even if we have less resources, we are here to support and protect them, and we will give them what we can with what we have.”
Other districts that received grants under the program are Trinity Alps Unified and the Wheatland Union High School District, both in Northern California. Also receiving grants are the Marin County Office of Education, Cal State East Bay and the University of Redlands, as well as two charter schools, Entrepreneur High School in San Bernardino and Academia Avance in Los Angeles.