The health and safety of Connecticut students must always be a top priority of our state and our legislature. Youth comprise the future of our state and our country as a whole, and it is essential to consider the protection of student well-being with the utmost importance.
Preserving student mental health is critical to the welfare of our state as a whole, as well as being indispensable at a personal level to individuals and communities. Worsened student mental health directly contributes to devastating acts of school violence, including school shootings, or student suicide.
Today, particularly given the constant pressure imposed on students in the digital age by social media, access to mental health support is a significant and vital means of protecting the future of our children, our friends and families, and the future of our state.
The Trump Administration’s recent discontinuation of several federal grants originally distributed as a part of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) with the intention of improving mental health services for students is appalling by nature, and casts serious concern over whether the priorities of the U.S. government are truly aligned to the best interests of the people.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has recently signed onto a coalition of 16 state attorneys general to file a lawsuit with the intention of restoring federal grant funds retracted by the Trump Administration to the schools which were originally intended to receive them. BSCA was passed into law under the Biden Administration to allocate funds for the support and promotion of mental health and safety programs in schools, as well as increasing federal regulation surrounding firearm distribution to prevent gun violence.
As a part of the grant allocation under BSCA, the Graduate School of Work at the University of Connecticut received a five-year grant of roughly $3.01 million to support 25 social work students in providing mental health services to the Waterbury, Vernon, Hartford, and New Britain school districts, supporting intra-district diversification of social workers as well as the overall augmentation of student mental health and well-being.
The actions of the Trump Administration are poorly justified, with the lawsuit itself citing the reasoning behind the revocation of certain federal grants to be “arbitrary and capricious.” The reclamation of the federal grant money was claimed by the attorneys general to be both unconstitutional and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. From a legal standpoint, the Trump Administration has behaved in a way unbefitting of a governing body.
Retracting the federal funds will only bring harm to students in need of support, and may potentiate violence in schools that results in mental and physical harm to student health and safety. Especially in rural or low-income districts, BSCA was a critical means of protecting student welfare and augmenting the quality of mental health services. Unfortunately, many communal mental health programs are already under strain, and thus students depend on school programs for support. Under BSCA, suicide risk lessened by almost half, and problematic behaviors such as absenteeism significantly decreased.
A letter from Dr. Murray Bessette of the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development in the U.S. Department of Education attempts to justify the discontinuation of the grants by stating that they “violate the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law; conflict with the Department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education; undermine the well-being of the students these programs are intended to help; or constitute an inappropriate use of federal funds.”
However, no court has yet ruled that the BSCA grants violate Federal Civil Rights Law. With respect to the reported decrease in problematic student behaviors under BSCA discussed in the previous paragraph, the BSCA grants clearly and effectively promoted the mental and physical well-being of students, tangibly improving educational merit and potential for excellence, which, according to Bessette, is a priority of the Department of Education.
The Biden Administration undertook the rigorous process to pass BSCA into law due to its clear potential to prevent gun violence and establish safe and supportive learning environments conducive to student mental well-being. It is genuinely perturbing that one of the major justifications used to support the reclamation of these grants is that they are not well-aligned with the Trump Administration’s priorities.
Now, with the discontinuation of key BSCA grants, graduate students such as those at UConn’s Graduate School of Social Work will lose critical financial support, potentially resulting in their being unable to continue their studies. School districts may be forced to fire social workers and mental health professionals hired in response to these grants, leaving students susceptible to mental health problems unable to receive help they need.
The Trump Administration is not only actively reversing the clear progress that BSCA was making to protect student mental health, but also leaving social workers and students without funding to support their jobs or their studies. These are real people, members of our community, whose welfare is diminishing in response to the arguably immoral and, depending on the outcome of the lawsuit filed by the attorneys general, veritably unconstitutional acts of the Trump Administration.
The people of Connecticut must give their full support to the opposition to the discontinuation of these grants. We must show support for legislators and interest groups that oppose the actions of the Trump Administration, whether that means monetary donation to support student mental health providers or public expression of disapproval regarding the Trump Administration’s grant discontinuations.
Now, today, Connecticut as a state must stand together to protect the mental well-being of our youth. This is a matter of politics, yes, but even more this is a matter of compassion, of empathy. These are our students, in our state, and we must do whatever is necessary to promote the well-being of our future generations.
Ari Shukla lives in West Hartford.