Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has joined a lawsuit seeking to stop the Trump administration from cancelling certain mental health grants for public schools — including one meant to fund social work interns serving four low-income districts in Connecticut.
The University of Connecticut’s Graduate School of Social Work had been awarded a five-year grant of just over $3 million as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which Congress passed in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. The grant was meant to support 25 graduate students in social work to provide mental health services in four Connecticut school districts — Hartford, New Britain, Waterbury and Vernon.
UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz said the program was set to begin this fall. The grant is now set to be terminated in December.
Along with Tong, sixteen other states signed onto the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on Monday. All the states they represent, with the exception of Nevada, have Democratic governors.
The federal Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
The UConn grant was part of $1 billion that Congress put aside for mental health services in high-need school districts in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The funds have allowed for the hiring of 1,300 mental health professionals and supported almost 775,000 K-12 students across the country, the lawsuit stated.
According to the lawsuit, suicide risk for students in participating high-need schools has dropped by half, while absenteeism and other problematic behavior also decreased. The programs that received funding also have been able to keep many of their mental health workers on staff, which has reduced the amount of time that students have to wait for help.
In December, UConn announced that it would use $588,000 received through the federal grant to launch the School Social Work Scholars program. The program would send graduate students at the School of Social Work into Hartford, New Britain, Waterbury and Vernon public schools, with the goal of broadening diversity among social workers in those districts.
Reitz declined to comment further, citing the pending lawsuit.
In their complaint, the attorneys general called the Trump administration’s move to discontinue the grant as “arbitrary and capricious.” They said the government’s notices that the grants would be discontinued — which programs received in April — contained “boilerplate language” that left unclear the reasons for cuts to each particular program.
They also claimed the cuts would force districts to lay off people they’d hired and place graduate students in the position of having to decide whether to pursue their studies without financial support. They said this would negatively affect students seeking mental health care.
If the grants are discontinued, the attorneys general wrote, “grantees in Plaintiff states will be forced to lay off school-based mental health service providers, reducing access to much-needed mental health services to their rural and low-income schools.”
“These grantees will lose qualified mental health service providers; and the benefits of the relationships their students have developed with these providers,” the lawsuit went on. “The spillover effect of students turning to community mental health services — to the extent they are available — will tax Plaintiffs’ already-strained mental health care system.”
Connecticut Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro criticized the cuts in recent days. On Monday, along with fellow Connecticut Democratic Rep. Jahana Hayes and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, DeLauro introduced a bill that would fund additional mental health workers in schools.
Kate Dias, President of the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, praised Tong for taking legal action against the federal government.
“Cutting this funding is not only shortsighted and unjust — it’s reckless. Our kids depend on school-based mental health professionals now more than ever,” she said in a statement.