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The New Mexico Attorney General and 15 other attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Education to stop federal cuts of money designed to support school-based mental health programs.
The $1 billion in funding for school-based mental health programs was allocated in the Safer Communities Act which was passed in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, TX, that took the lives of 19 students and two teachers and injured 17 others in 2022.
On April 29 of this year, the Department of Education announced that it is discontinuing those grants.
In a statement, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the move “reckless” and said that it also “defies the law and threatens to dismantle programs that are saving lives.”
The complaint claims that the Department of Education violated the Administrative Procedure Act and protections in the Safer Communities Act.
Torrez also cites the National Association of School Psychologists saying that the program “reduced suicide risk by 50%, improved school attendance, and increased staff-student engagement.”
Executive Director for the New Mexico Alliance for School-Based Health Care Nancy Rodriguez said she is “sad” that this funding might be going away and that there is a “great need” for this type of funding.
“It’s bad enough to not have it but to offer it and then yank it out like a rug from underneath people who are seeing improvements is not ideal,” Rodriguez said.
According to Rodriguez, the care funding helped students in a variety of ways across grade levels and that the funding was used for prevention, intervention and treatment.
“They were doing everything from dealing with bullying down at the elementary school level all the way up to making sure young people got referred for care at the older ages if families needed that support,” Rodriguez explained.
This cut in funding will not affect school-based health centers, though Rodriguez warned that any cuts to the school-based mental health services would mean more work for the traditional health services at schools.
“Whatever that overflow is, it could possibly come to them,” Rodriguez said. “In many cases, they already have a waiting list for providing behavioral health services for young people.”
In New Mexico, the funding went to eight different schools in districts like Silver City, Quemado Independent Schools, Vaughn Municipal Schools and Magdalena Municipal Schools.
New Mexico is joined in the lawsuit by California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
