Washington public schools got a reprieve this week when a U.S. District Court judge issued a temporary restraining order on Monday, stopping the U.S. Department of Education from implementing a plan to cancel school-based mental health grants. Without the order, the department was on track to terminate up to nine Washington grants — about $20 million in mental health support for Washington’s K-12 students — by the end of July.
“We have now beaten back multiple attempts by this administration to illegally gut funding for mental health in our schools,” Attorney General Nick Brown said in a release. “This program was a promise to America’s youth that their needs would be supported, and we won’t let the President break it.”
The funding was allocated by Congress in the aftermath of a string of school shootings. With support across party lines, lawmakers committed $1 billion to place 14,000 mental health workers in schools where they were most needed, with a particular focus on rural and low-income districts. One year in, close to 775,000 K-12 students across the country have been able to hire counselors, reducing suicide, school absences, and behavior problems in schools where incidences and risk of those behaviors ran higher.
Then in April 2025, the Department of Education moved to cancel the funding, saying it clashed with the Trump administration’s priorities. The department later acknowledged that the real target of the funding cancellation effort was grants’ ties to diversity, equity and inclusion work.
Washington has now won six court rulings in favor of keeping the grant monies flowing. Brown’s office sued the department in July 2025 and, by December, had secured a ruling that deemed the original cancellations unlawful. The court permanently barred the department from canceling the funding “through any means.”
And yet, the department announced it would terminate the same grants anyway, prompting a second lawsuit this July.
Last week’s court restraining order blocks those terminations through August 24, while the court weighs whether to grant longer-term protection by way of a preliminary injunction. Brown is leading the coalition alongside attorneys general from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.
