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• After Federal Cuts, California Schools Could Lose Hundreds of Mental Health Clinicians

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McKinleyville Union School District has sued the U.S. Department of Education for allegedly discontinuing the district’s federal mental health grant illegally, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. 

In April, the Department of Education notified McKinleyville Union and 48 other grant recipients that it would cancel roughly $168 million in remaining funds for mental health services to students in California. The lawsuit is the first on behalf of a single school district in California, as the state’s case against the Trump administration remains in limbo. Without the funding, California schools are set to lose hundreds of counselors, social workers and mental health support staff on Dec. 31. 

“McKinleyville relied on its grant to hire additional mental health providers and offer critically needed mental health supports to its students,” said Amanda Mangaser Savage, an attorney at Public Counsel, the nonprofit law firm representing the district, which is seeking reinstatement of the five-year grant. “The administration’s unilateral and arbitrary actions make plain its indifference to the lasting harms its decisions are inflicting on high poverty, rural communities, including here in the state of California.”

In Humboldt County, about 58% of youth have experienced traumatic events like abuse or homelessness, and by high school, more than one in five have considered suicide, according to Savage. The county has a high population of Native American students, who also have the highest rate of suicide among any other demographic, and reports one of the worst rates of child poverty in the state. 

Savage said the Trump administration sent McKinleyville Union the same “boilerplate letter” as it had to other school districts, stating that the district had violated their standard of “merit, fairness and excellence in education” and failed to comply with the “priorities and policy preferences” of the Trump administration. After the cancellation, McKinleyville Union is set to lose nearly $6 million from a school-based mental health grant that had been set for the next four years. 

“We did everything that the federal government asked of us, and now our funding’s gone,” said Julie Giannini-Previde, superintendent of McKinleyville Union School District. “For many of our kids, the place they go for all of their services — for safety, for food, for mental health support — is the school. And, losing this level of support for our kids could literally be a case of life or death for some of our students.”

Before receiving the grant, McKinleyville Union had only one school counselor for 850 students in transitional kindergarten through eighth grade on three campuses, according to the lawsuit. Giannini-Previde said the district was able to hire five more school counselors to provide screenings, counseling and crisis intervention to students who experience high poverty, lack health care access and can’t make the six-hour drive to the nearest metropolitan area for support. 

Angela Sundberg, social services director for Trinidad Rancheria, a public program serving Native families in the child welfare system in Humboldt County, said the loss in funding will place a bigger burden on their “already burdened” staff of two therapists. Sundberg said the county’s behavioral health system has at least a two-month waitlist for children in need of immediate care, and even when they receive it, they’re not guaranteed to find a provider who can connect with them. 

“The in-school opportunity to be able to have our kids be seen is, literally, the way that our kids are able to access mental health,” said Sundberg. Native American students are “experiencing the trauma of neglect and abuse and addiction leading back to the (government) boarding schools. McKinleyville understands where our Native population comes from.”

Sundberg said Trinidad Rancheria does not have the capacity to absorb the need for mental health support at McKinleyville Union, especially since Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ cut their own funding for the next year. 

In September, Trump officials announced a pared-down version of the school-based mental health grant program, requiring districts to reapply and excluding funds for school social workers and counselors. But under the Trump administration’s new criteria, McKinleyville Union School District had too few students to even qualify for the application, said Giannini-Previde. 

“What’s going to happen is that our students just simply won’t have access to these mental health supports at school,” said Giannini-Previde. “They may or may not get in to see anybody in a crisis situation, and more importantly, even if they do get access to service, it’s not going to be somebody they know and trust, who they see every single day while they’re at school.” 

In 2019, a student died by suicide on McKinleyville High School’s campus. Since then, McKinleyville Union has relied solely on the federal grant to prevent another tragedy in the community, said Giannini-Previde. With more support, teachers can now recognize and refer students in crisis, counselors can immediately and effectively intervene, and students can return to class better able to learn, she said. If the grant is not reinstated, students may have nowhere else to go.

“There’s no plan B,” said Giannini-Previde. “We don’t have the funding to provide this level of support without this grant.”