Over the past year, the Trump administration has terminated multiple grants — together worth over $10 million — that were supposed to help schools in Illinois hire more mental health professionals.
It’s 2 a.m. and Mallory Boehm-Benassi is on her computer searching for solutions.
“I was having a night,” she said. “Most people leave work at work. I'm so passionate about what I do, it comes with me.”
She’s the executive director of the Bureau-Marshall-Putnam Special Education Cooperative. Her special-ed teachers work in 14 rural school districts across those three Illinois counties. The problem she was up all night trying to solve? She can’t find enough school psychologists, and the need goes up every year.
They’ve offered signing bonuses but still couldn’t compete with the suburbs. They’ve hired remote psychologists, but they can’t do everything, and now that pool is drying up too.
“The shortage is real, it is real and it is scary and it is stressful,” said Boehm-Benassi. “You know, you hear about it, you read about it, I'm living it.”
The National Association of School Psychologists recommends one school psychologist per 500 students. At the co-op, it’s nearly 1,000.
“The only thing that my school psyches currently have time to do is the very tip of the iceberg, which is testing students for (special education) reevaluations and evaluations,” she said. “The whole bottom of that iceberg is the mental health stuff, the data reporting, all of the things they really went to school to do, they can't do.”
Luckily, that night, she found a new grant the U.S. Department of Education awarded Northern Illinois University. It’s a multi-year program that pays teachers already working in the district to become school psychologists.
School psychologists are experts in two big areas: mental health and special education. So, training is intensive: multiple years of grad school and a full-year internship. It can be cost prohibitive and, if you’re working, it’s hard to find the time.
So, Boehm-Benassi signed them up for the program. They now have two students in it and could have five new, home-grown school psychologists within the next few years.
But the program might not continue. Last year, the Trump administration canceled the grant. Illinois and other states have filed a federal lawsuit to retain its more than $2 million of funding.
“The most recent information I heard was that the federal judge had said that the Department of Education had improperly stopped those funds,” said Lisa Becker. She’s a former school psychologist and now works as an administrator in the DeKalb School District, which is also part of the NIU grant.
She says, right now, the university has guaranteed funding for students to finish this semester but, beyond that, they don’t know if it’ll continue. A judge will weigh in on their appeal in early March.
Right now, DeKalb has three school psychologist interns. They’ll finish the program this spring and start full-time in the fall. One’s a middle school teacher, one’s a bilingual teacher, and one’s in early childhood.
“We recently had a death of a staff member in our schools, and it impacted our early learning and development center,” said Becker. “Our intern that works at that building has been able to provide so much support, particularly to that classroom, in terms of grief support.”
That intern, Adrien Fell, has been an early childhood teacher for the past dozen years in DeKalb.
“We, at the pre-K early childhood center, have never had a full-time school psychologist," she said, "and being a teacher here, I've noticed a need for those social-emotional learning supports."
Mallory Boehm-Benassi at the special education co-op prays the grant can continue, because she’s just about out of options.
“I mean, nothing's worked," she said. "This was, honestly, like the only light at the end of our tunnel. Because if there was a different light, if something else was already going to work for us, it would have already happened. Honestly, I have no idea what we're going to do.”
That NIU program is not the only school mental health grant the Trump administration terminated. They also canceled two grants for the Illinois State Board of Education to recruit and support more school mental health professionals.
For both grants, the state partnered with the Stress and Trauma Treatment Center. They’re a mental health provider in southern Illinois that provides training to schools across the state. Matt Buckman is the executive director. He says the grant helped them work with 61 high-need districts in Illinois.
In the program’s first year, 26 of those districts hired more school mental health staff. They could provide a $25,000 salary stipend for high-need schools. But now, with the termination, districts that planned to expand were caught in a bind, unsure if the money would be there. Buckman says many of those expansions fell through.
“I only know of one district," he said, "that actually ended up hiring somebody without these funds — knowing there weren’t these funds."
Thousands of School-Based Mental Health grants were cut, but some weren’t. Buckman says he thinks theirs was because it prioritized diversity, to have staff match student demographics.
The future’s still murky. In December, a federal judge ruled the cancellations were unlawful and ordered the funding be permanently reinstated. The ruling says the two sides will meet and agree on a timeline for lawful grant continuation decisions. So far, spokespeople for the Illinois State Board of Education say they haven’t heard anything.
Either way, Buckman says he’s proud of their work.
“There were thousands of kids across the state that received services," he said, "that didn't receive it the year prior. I mean, that's a huge thing.”
