But just because we’re always worrying doesn’t mean that we’re always wrong. Children today are struggling with their mental health — struggling to maintain a semblance of hope about the future they’re inheriting. — report feeling so discouraged that it interferes with their daily lives. 

This youth mental health crisis has been with us for a moment. In 2018, in response to the horrifying Parkland, Florida, school shooting, President Donald Trump’s using federal School Safety funding for investments to “expand the pipeline of school-based mental health services providers.” The ensuing began in 2019, near the end of Trump’s first term. 

And yet, despite the issue’s ongoing urgency, the second Trump administration . Among the schools that felt that loss was the Multicultural Learning Center, a public charter school on the outskirts of Los Angeles County. As the administration’s decision works its way through the courts, it’s worth considering what might be lost if we stop investing in supporting children’s mental health. 

A $4.6M grant for students’ well-being

Winter is sunny in Canoga Park, where the Multicultural Learning Center’s campus is cloudless, ice-free and pushing 70 degrees. The air’s crisp on a dry December Thursday in the school’s courtyard garden, which hosts a series of green, thriving native plants and a sign that outlines the school’s goals for its learners: “Caring, Respectful, Responsible, Safe, Tolerant.” 

The dual language immersion charter school opened in after California voters approved a statewide mandate largely banning bilingual education. Its status as a charter allowed it flexibility from that decision, which it used to pursue a child-focused pedagogy in both English and Spanish. Co-founder and executive director Gayle Nadler says that these elements serve the goal of “learner agency. We want our students to be ready to advocate for themselves.”

This focus on students’ social skills and well-being sharpened as the school reopened after the pandemic. This tracked national—and international—trends. A of the pandemic’s impact on children found that they “consistently point[ed] to a decline in child wellbeing globally.” At the Multicultural Learning Center, school leaders now estimate that they had capacity to support only one-quarter of their children who needed services. 

In 2022, seeking to grow that capacity, the school applied with several other charters for one of . They were awarded nearly $4.6 million over five years, which launched at the beginning of 2023. Simultaneously, the school secured funding from to construct a small “Wellness Center” where students could receive the mental health support they needed. 

That $4.6 million made it possible for the school to staff the center with two full-time therapists and a rotating group of graduate interns preparing for careers in social work or therapy. “The funds get used to partner with universities to have master’s-level students do their fieldwork with us,” Nadler says, “to hire recently graduated candidates from those same universities to work on our staff.” 

The program at Multicultural Learning Center modeled the twin purposes of the grant: create more demand in the job market for school-based mental health therapists by funding those positions while making the schools a training ground for future therapists.

When the administration zeroed out the grants last April, it blocked MLC from accessing the last $1.9 million originally budgeted for the project.

The sudden loss of funds left grantees like Nadler in a lurch. She estimates that her school’s share of the money raised their mental health services capacity to a level that they were meeting the needs of at least 95% of students who needed support. To try to recover the resources they’d been expecting, the school joined a lawsuit headed by Washington state. 

The federal government technically ended the grants by denying their renewal, arguing that they were no longer aligned with the president’s second term priorities. While federal grants are subject to regular reviews to ensure that grantees are meeting expectations, the Multicultural Learning Center and their co-plaintiffs countered that the administration had made the choice to cancel their grants without any substantive consideration of the work being done. 

In December, , and ordered the administration to undertake an appropriate review of the grants by the end of the month. The administration then disbursed small “interim” grants — $90,000 in the Multicultural Learning Center’s case — while individual reviews took place. As the deadline for these reviews neared, the Education Department requested an extension from the court while it prepared an appeal. 

On Feb. 24, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused, ruling that the administration appeared unlikely to convince the courts that it had provided grantees adequate reason for canceling their funding. 

In the meantime, the ruling meant that the department had to release the originally promised 2026 funds for the mental health grants for recipients like the Multicultural Learning Center.

The saga is far from over. As the Education Department plans its appeal, it released six months of the promised 2026 funding. In a letter sent to grantees, the department explained that the remaining half may be made available after it conducts an “updated performance and budget report,” depending on how the lawsuit is ultimately settled.

For now, the school is muddling through, staffing the Wellness Center through the end of this school year with the half-year of funding they were able to pry loose through the courts. Nadler says it’s a priority to maintain these services, but isn’t sure where she’ll find the funds to replace the federal resources if the Trump administration ultimately succeeds in blocking the rest of the 2026 money they’d budgeted for. 

Taking care of the kids still No. 1

Almost anything can become normal if we let it. Remember traveling without a phone in your pocket? Remember when school shootings were so rare that, when they occurred, we expected our political leaders to act to make them even less likely?

Humans can get used to most anything. But that doesn’t mean that we can navigate any particular new normal with an equal degree of ease. This is particularly true for children, who are less practiced at accommodation than their parents and caregivers. You might have grown used to bloodstained classrooms and brazen public corruption, but your 11-year-old’s gonna have questions when they first see these sorts of things. 

As I’ve written many times now, this is the key to understanding the United States’s youth mental health crisis. The various tech boogeymen haunting public discourse — smartphones, social media, screens more generally — are real problems, but insufficient for understanding the depth of the problem. No, today’s kids are gloomy because they are clearsighted: we have dealt them a genuinely terrible hand. 

To dig them (and ourselves) out of this hole, we need to 1) make actual, effective steps towards a safer, stabler and more dignified world worthy of our children’s dreams; and 2) provide mental health services to help repair the damage we’ve done to their well-being. 

“The number one thing you can do to prevent school violence,” Nadler says, “is mental health counseling, build[ing] relationships, taking care of the kids. That’s the number one thing. It’s not metal detectors, it’s not active shooter drills, it’s not armed guards, none of that.” 

“I just can’t imagine a world,” she added, “where we don’t take care of people — and it starts with children.”

The , signed by 65 organizations, was spearheaded by the Medicaid in the Schools Coalition, which advocates to protect and improve school-based Medicaid programs, which primarily serve students with disabilities and those living in poverty.

“Any cuts to Medicaid would reduce care for children with disabilities, undermine efforts to address the mental health crisis and exacerbate workforce shortages of school health providers,” said Jessie Mandle, the national program director at the and coalition co-chair. “Strong school-based Medicaid programs … rely on a strong Medicaid program overall, and so cutting Medicaid is equivalent to cutting school district budgets.”

Schools receive about $7.5 billion annually from , a popular joint federal and state health program that insures nearly 70 million Americans, most of whom are low-income. For more than 30 years, it’s paid for services in schools for students with disabilities as well as low-income students.

While President Trump said this week that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would in the GOP’s quest to deliver $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and beefed-up border security, in Medicaid funding decreases are being eyed in the House.

School-based Medicaid makes up less than 1% of the overall program’s budget, but is still the fourth-largest funding stream for districts and allows them to pay for a swath of resources, including therapies for students with disabilities, school nurses, mental health care and specialized equipment, such as wheelchairs. 

of districts use Medicaid funding to pay for the salaries of health professionals, according to 2017 data. New data forthcoming from The Healthy Schools Campaign suggests that the number is now even higher, Mandle told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

And — 40 million — are now insured through Medicaid or the , which provides low-cost health coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Previous that improving children’s health improves their classroom performance.

Meanwhile, the political confusion over whether Medicaid will be protected has done little to quell anxiety that the funding might be in jeopardy. 

A Feb. 19 statement to from White House spokesperson Kush Desai attempted to reconcile Trump’s comments shielding Medicaid with his support for the proposed House budget that targets it: “The Trump administration is committed to protecting Medicare and Medicaid while slashing the waste, fraud, and abuse within those programs — reforms that will increase efficiency and improve care for beneficiaries.”

Any spending caps or reductions to the federal match would shift the bulk of the mandated costs of providing health care coverage to states, according to the coalition’s letter. This could have “devastating” effects, leading to a cut in services for all students — not just those with disabilities — or increased local taxes. 

On the ground, this could result in fewer social workers or school-based psychologists, decreased access to health care — especially in rural and urban communities, a loss of critical supplies that allow children with disabilities to access the same curricular as their peers and noncompliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the coalition states.

“We have a very underfunded special education system,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy at and coalition co-chair, “and this Medicaid reimbursement is a critical source of funding.”

“Trying to find the money within our local education budget to fill in gaps where Medicaid currently reimburses districts would be — in this funding environment in particular — an enormous challenge,” she continued.

Silvia Yee, policy director at the , which co-signed the letter, said it’s particularly important that many of these health-related services are available in schools because they are widely trusted community hubs and family touchpoints. 

The burden of cuts would be felt particularly by vulnerable families, she added: “The more you reduce the available resources to a lower-income family, the more you’re potentially digging a pit for that family, and it’s very hard to dig out of.”

Yee also noted that a rollback in federal funding could make it more challenging for students with disabilities to learn in an integrated setting with their peers, setting them up for “segregation for the rest of their lives.”

“All of these services can and should work together to help us achieve integration that’s not a burden on teachers [and] not a burden on schools,” she said. “Helping take care of children’s medical needs in school is a step forward. Taking that away is such a step backward.”