Policy Shifts in School Mental Health with Matthew Stone

welcome to Mental Health Evolution, a podcast about what's changing in mental health and why it matters. I'm your host, Rachel Harrison, inviting you into honest conversations with people from all perspectives in the field. Clinicians, tech founders, investors, insurance companies, and all the folks in between. Let's explore what's working, what's not, what's, and what's next. Welcome back everyone to the Mental Health Evolution Podcast where we are talking about how the landscape is quickly changing in the mental health industry. Today we are joined by Matthew Stone, who is a reporter at Education week. Matthew covers K12 education policy with a focus on issues including mental health, school funding, and federal and state policy changes that impact public education. He has written extensively on the challenges schools face in providing adequate mental health services, especially in the wake of the pandemic. As always, before we talk to our guests, we'd like to bring up some relevant articles related to our guest topic today. These are articles that may be helpful for listeners who want to learn more about this topic and dive deeper. The first article here from KFF is the Landscape of School Based Mental Health Services. This article provides current data on school based mental health services including usage rates, staffing shortages and funding challenges, all major things that schools are facing right now. It highlights how changes in federal grant allocations have affected the ability of schools to meet students mental health needs. The second article we have here is from US House press release called Fitzpatrick Leads Bipartisan Coalition pushing for Answers on potential relocation of 1 billion in school mental Health Funding. This press release describes concerns from lawmakers about the reallocation of school mental health funds and potential impacts on districts ability to hire and retain mental health professionals. And lastly, we have an article from our guest today from Education Week called the Trump Administration Relaunches School Mental Health Grants. It yanked with a twist. This article written by Matthew Stone details how federal school mental health grants were relaunched with a focus specifically on school psychologists, excluding other health mental health professionals. It also explores the implications for districts trying to meet diverse student mental health needs. And speaking of this article, Matthew, since you read it yourself, we'd love to hear your perspective, excuse me, on the policy shifts it covers and how these changes are affecting students and schools. And your thoughts on why the administration is emphasizing school psychologists. So let's kind of dig into this and pull this apart a little bit. I'd love to just ask you as we get started, can you share a little bit about your work at Education Week. And what drew you to covering education policy and specifically mental health in schools?

Sure, yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Rachel. It's great to be on this podcast. Critically important topic that we're discussing in terms of my work. I'm an assistant managing editor here at Education Week, so I oversee our coverage of education policy and politics, school finance, various other topics over the past year. In particular, that's involved really closely tracking just a barrage of policy changes coming down from the Trump administration in Washington and trying to keep our audience of educators up to date with the information that they need to do their jobs. So it hasn't only been the dramatic downsizing at the Department of Education that we've been covering. And of course, there has been, as. There was more of that announced just this week. But we've been keeping track of executive orders, various directives aimed at schools over diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies, policies around transgender students. All of those are things that schools have had to navigate over the past year. And then there's also a lot of funding uncertainty, as the administration has very abruptly terminated lots of grants and contracts that were in progress and that grantees expected. Grantees expected they would have several years, in some cases, to carry out this work, but received surprise notices that the funding would end before they had planned on it.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think mental health is such an important topic. Yes, in general, but also in the schools I know from people I'm in conversation with who are leaders in various places in schools, what they're reporting seeing is that there's a lot higher need for mental health support in our schools. Is that what you're also seeing as you write on some of these topics?

Oh, completely, yeah. In terms of mental health, that's a topic that has just dominated our coverage, particularly since COVID As students returned to school, as buildings reopened, educators were really noticing that their students were struggling more. They'd been isolated during lockdowns. They were spending a lot more time on their phones and social media. It was a time of economic uncertainty for a lot of people and just uncertainty in general. You know, when. When is this lockdown gonna end? Will life ever get back to normal? I mean, that takes a toll, as. As you all know. So I. I think those. But one. One thing that that's also important to note was that while Covid really accentuated these problems, Covid wasn't the start of this trend. In terms of a lot of statistics that are available for tracking students mental health, we had been seeing a decline almost at the start of a decline almost a decade before COVID came at us in 2020.

No, I think you make a really good point. And from where I sit, having a history of being a mental health professional, group practice owner, all those things, definitely it wasn't brand new with the pandemic. But what I think we saw, at least in our interaction with the public, was an increase in more like intensity. I kind of feel like it up leveled everyone's mental health struggles. You know, everybody went up a level or two. And so we just kind of saw this bump. Sometimes that meant people that weren't really struggling too much were now struggling, but for people that were already struggling, they were struggling more. So that's kind of how I would conceptualize what I've seen.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good way to put it in our reporting. A lot, a lot of the focus has been been focused on how these problems have manifested themselves. So on the top of teachers minds are behavioral problems. Where we at Education Week are able to survey educators periodically. And in those surveys we saw teachers saying that, consistently saying that behavior problems had gotten a lot worse since COVID When kids are dysregulated, when they don't have strategies for regulating their emotions, when they just have so much going on in their lives, you know, the uncertainty and all of those difficulties that the pandemic brought on. Plus, I mean, I think another factor that I've heard from mental health specialists is students spending more time alone. There's less unstructured social time that they're spending with their friends. All of those can manifest themselves in some major behavioral problems that really take the focus off of learning and pose to such a huge classroom management problem for teachers.

Right. I mean, when you think about having 25, 30, maybe even 35 kids in a classroom all at the same time, if one person is dysregulated, it's probably kind of going to spread throughout the room a little bit. Right. And that's a lot. I mean, I think that's always been a tough job for teachers to manage. And I know that they have training around that and all of those good things and they can't do the level of one on one intervention sometimes needed in those situations in those cases. That's right, yeah. Yeah. So I'm wondering, like when you're seeing policy shifts, I mean, I love how you kind of talked about like it was yanked away. Right. Is this is my understanding, the grants were yanked away and now there's something coming back. There's some Relaunching, coming back. Can you kind of walk us through how that has all evolved?

Yeah. So if you'll indulge me a little bit, I'll back up just a few years, please.

Yes.

So I'd say over the past five years, we've seen some of the most substantial federal investments in student mental health that we've ever seen. But in particular, so in 2022, the bipartisan Safer Communities act passed after the deadly devastating school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. And that package included $1 billion for these two grant programs that had actually started during the first Trump administration, actually in the wake of yet another school shooting, the one in Parkland, Florida. So the bipartisan Safer Communities act set aside $1 billion more than these grant programs ever had. And from what I've seen in court records and other sources, the Federal Government awarded 339 grants to school districts, to groups of school districts, to state departments of education, to universities. One of the grant programs was to help schools hire and recruit retain mental health professionals. And the other was focused on training future school mental health professionals to really bolster that pipeline. Because for so long, schools have been struggling to find and employ enough school counselors and school psychologists. The associations that represent school counselors and school psychologists have recommended ratios of students to counselors and psychologists. And for as long, probably as anybody can remember, we've been well in excess of those ratios. So the federal government awarded one set of those grants in 2022. The funding started in January of 23. And then there was another set of grants awarded in last year. And so the funding started In January of 2025, right before the change in presidential administration. And grantees said they were either about halfway through their five year grants or really just getting their work started. And then in April, the Department of Education sent the same notice to about three quarters of the grantees. I forget the specific number that got this notice, but it just said in a few paragraphs, your funding will not continue past the current grant period because it reflects the priorities of the prior administration and no longer effectuates the priorities of the federal government. So that was the start of a lot of upheaval and uncertainty for the schools and other entities who had gotten this funding with very firm plans to expand the degree of mental health supports they could offer their students.

Well, right, and thinking about, like, that whole process of hiring grant. So is that a we've hired somebody now, how do we cover their salary? Those kinds of situations?

Yeah, precisely. I mean, say you got your grant and it started in January 2025. And then you get this notice in April saying that your funding will end as of December 31st. I mean, you have a year of funding when you expected five. But you might just be getting the work off the ground. You might just be making the connections you need to hire new school counselors, school psychologists, social workers. And then all of a sudden, you have this. This shadow of uncertainty hanging over all the work. So, yeah, you don't know. So if you already had people on staff providing mental health services to students, you don't know if you'll have the money to keep employing them past the end of this abbreviated grant period.

Right. And then the grant year is at the middle of the school year. I'm also thinking that's an interesting dynamic, too, right?

It is, yeah. I think that's an oddity of just when the bipartisan Safer Communities act was passed, and then just the time it takes to set up a grant competition, make the awards. So, yeah, the funding does start in January, which is something. Even if there hadn't been this drama around the terminations, that's something that the grantees would have had to contend with anyway.

And so now the shift is that the grants are still happening, but with different requirements.

Is that my understanding when the administration announced that these funds were ending, they by law had to provide every grantee with the opportunity to appeal the termination. So many of them did, you know, some of them held out a little bit of hope. Well, maybe when I make my case, they'll reconsider. To my knowledge, none of those appeals were granted.

Okay.

And then the other thing the administration did when it announced this discontinuation was to say, we're going to launch a new grant competition with our own administration's priorities, and we'll. We'll award the rest of the money that's been appropriated for this purpose. And so that new competition, I mean, of course that was going to take time, too. Anytime you have to create new rules for a new grant competition, put out the notice soliciting applications, you have to have a period for people to submit applications. Then you have to have a review period, make the awards. That all. That all takes time. So that new competition started to take place over the summer when the Department of Education released its proposed priorities for the new grants. And that's when we first learned, well, these new grants will only be for the purpose of boosting the numbers of school psychologists and not other mental health professionals. Another change was that universities could no longer apply for the grants, whereas before it could have been schools. Consortia of school districts, state education departments, counselors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the grants is focused on training future mental health professionals. Universities were doing a lot of that. So it will be interesting to see who gets the, the new awards for training if universities aren't in the mix.

This is fascinating to me because in most school systems that I have been a part of in a few different states, so this isn't necessarily across the board. School psychologists are normally the ones that do the testing for IEPs. All of that 504s, right. That whole piece. They're not typically the ones that are providing any kind of interventions or support or care. Is this changing that paradigm or is it just supporting the hiring at that level in those, those positions? Because those often run low as well.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. To be clear, there is a need for school psychologists. I mean, as, as I've school mental health over the past few years, I've heard school psychologists characterized as something of an untapped resource, you know, because as you mentioned, they spend so much of their time doing special education evaluations and testing rather than providing direct services to students. So, I mean, there is a case to be made that if you increase the number of school psychologists, then you free them up to do more with their time than just the testing and the evaluations. So you free up a resource to provide some more direct supports to students.

Yes. And I think in general, if you look at the overall how many mental health providers there are in general and the need, I think a lot of where social workers and counselors came into play was that there already weren't enough psychologists and they were more expensive. So it was how do we get people that can do the work? Kind of like a doctor with a psychiatric or a nurse practitioner. Right. Kind of a similar idea like we need to broaden the workforce here. So that's just interesting to me because even if they are going to, it's going to be probably a higher cost than master's level because a psychologist would be a doctoral level. Right. I'm just very curious about the ins and outs of it, which I know you don't necessarily have the answers to. I'm just speculating over here.

Yeah, I'm curious about the ins and outs too. And the administration has said that it expects to award $270 million now under these two grant programs. So that's presumably what remains from the $1 billion originally. And so, yeah, school psychologists, if they are more expensive, then the money doesn't go quite as far. I mean, I think the focus on school psychologists has stumped a lot of people in the mental health world. You know, mental health experts, as I said, of course, there is a documented need for more of them, as there are for school counselors and school social workers, other types of professionals who can help students. But these grant programs, when they started during the first Trump administration, they focused on all types of school mental health professionals and not just one. And so just narrowing the focus to one has really came as a surprise. I did extract. So we didn't learn a whole lot about the reasoning until late September when the administration launched the new grant competition. And so when they did that, they had to respond to all of these public comments they had received. So many of the public comments said, well, this grant competition should be broader than just school psychologists. And so the reasoning that officials from the Department of Education offered was, well, you know, school psychologists are equipped to provide more intensive services to high need students. And then a second part of the reason was, well, we have a limited amount of money. This is what we've decided to focus the grant competition. And as I've spoken with people about this new competition, I mean, one concern that's been raised is, well, the need is broader than just school psychologists. And also you have school districts, presumably from across the country, who have applied for these funds. And a school district in one place might have the need for a psychologist, a school district, and another might have the need for more school counselors. Another district might want school social workers. So if you're trying to design a grant competition that really responds to local needs, you're eliminating the possibility of fulfilling a big part of those local needs.

Right. So this has been really fascinating to learn more about these changes. I'm wondering, as we wrap up today, if there's one thing that you think parents, educators, mental health professionals, policymakers should be paying attention to as these things are evolving, what would you say that is?

Yeah, I mean, I guess one important thing to note is, you know, we're talking about federal action today, but that's not the only action that there is in the policy area for student mental health. States are doing a lot. School districts are, with or without this federal money. They're contending with elevated needs among their students and trying to find ways to serve them better. So even with these grantees, if they had been able to see their projects all the way through, they would have come to the point where the federal funding would have run out and they had to develop sustainability plans. So some have talked about setting up the infrastructure to build Medicaid for more of these services. To try to ease the pressure on local budgets, districts are partnering with local mental health service providers. You know, maybe you have a clinician come in weekly for designated hours. You know, school. When kids can get mental health services at school, it tends to be more effective. They're more likely to follow through with a service. They don't miss class time to go to an appointment in the middle of the day or as much class time. So there's still a lot of focus in this area on what can we do to help students mental health.

Yeah.

And so I think as we, you know, as we talk about these very significant federal investments, it's also important to note that the action is also happening elsewhere.

I like that. Well, thank you so much, Matthew, for being here. It was really enlightening to talk to you today. And we will be back next week to discuss more issues relevant in the mental health care community. Thank you for listening and bye for now.