Attorney General Campbell joins other states in lawsuit challenging Department of Education mental health funding cuts
Education in Massachusetts has seen
Advertisement
'As our young people face a nationwide mental health epidemic, it is critical to ensure they have access to the resources they need, including mental health professionals in schools,' Campbell said in the statement. 'The Trump Administration does not have the power to arbitrarily revoke grant funding that provides critical mental health services to our students.'
'I will continue to fight against unlawful federal actions that harm our children,' she said.
Advertisement
Campbell signed the lawsuit with attorney generals from three other New England states: Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island. The remaining states are California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit names the Department of Education and Education Secretary
Funds for
'Because of the termination of this program, thousands of low-income American students across several school districts in Greater Boston will lose the support of these psychologists and counselors in training,' the statement said.
In April,
Ava Berger can be reached at
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
27 minutes ago
- Yahoo
New Mexico joins multi-state suit over slashed mental health funding. Here's why.
Jul. 1—New Mexico is joining 15 other states in suing the Trump administration over the halted flow of $1 billion in federal mental health grants axed by the Department of Education earlier this year. The grants were introduced in a 2022 bipartisan piece of legislation called the Safer Communities Act, passed on the heels of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of 19 children and two adults. In April, the education department announced it would be terminating those grants. "It is one of our greatest responsibilities to protect the mental health and safety of our children," New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement on Tuesday. "The Department's decision to abruptly eliminate this funding is not only reckless, but it also defies the law and threatens to dismantle programs that are saving lives." The discontinuation of the grants occurred nearly a month after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March to dismantle the Department of Education and as the administration worked toward cutting costs through the Department of Government Efficiency. The education department did not respond to a request for comment on why it chose to cut those grants. The cuts could have major effects across the state. For instance, the Central Region Educational Cooperative, or CREC, has been operating off a five-year, $6.5 million federal grant to provide mental health services to seven rural school districts: Belen Consolidated Schools, Estancia Municipal School District, Jemez Valley Public Schools, Magdalena Municipal School District, Mountainair Public Schools, Quemado Independent Schools and Vaughn Municipal Schools. "Removing these services means that students don't get the support ... their mental health is compromised. These are rural school districts, so there's no access to those services," said Velinda Pearson, CREC's school-based mental health program coordinator. "Working parents aren't going to drive their kiddo an hour or two hours away to get the service every week." Pearson added that the team had just reached full staffing in September, but if funding isn't salvaged, she and the rest of her staff could be out of jobs by December. "We are looking at other options. ... We'll try everything we can to continue the services," Pearson said. She said the plan written into the grant was to bill Medicaid for services provided after five years. But on Tuesday, with the passage of the budget reconciliation package by the Senate, sweeping cuts to Medicaid were made, which could alter that plan. Pearson met with the state's Public Education Department in June to discuss possibly filling the funding gap, but said that the department requested additional data. PED did not respond to a request for comment sent Monday, asking if it would help plug funding gaps. "New Mexico is experiencing a significant mental health crisis with one of the highest rates of suicide in the U.S. The defunding of programs like ours is alarming and upsetting," Pearson said. "We need to stop playing politics off the backs and lives of our most vulnerable communities and all come together in this fight to stop people's pain and suffering." The other states that joined the lawsuit are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Washington.
Business Insider
41 minutes ago
- Business Insider
Corona's owner says beer sales have slowed because one major customer group isn't buying beer like it used to
Corona's parent company said its sales have fallen, in part because Hispanic customers aren't buying as much beer. New York-based Constellation Brands posted its first quarter earnings on Tuesday, reporting $2.23 billion in beer sales in the quarter — a 2% decline from the year before. The company said its top sales states, particularly "zip codes with larger Hispanic populations," saw subdued spending. Hispanic customers make up about 50% of the company's beer consumer base, Constellation Brands' CEO, Bill Newlands, said in April's earnings call. Newlands and the company's CFO said in a joint commentary on Tuesday that the company had surveyed a group of its customers, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic. The execs wrote that survey results showed "over 80% of the surveyed Hispanic and non-Hispanic consumers expressed concerns about the socioeconomic environment in the U.S." The survey results also showed that customers were reducing their group gatherings, both in public and at home, and avoiding shopping at convenience stores and gas stations. Newlands said in the earlier April earnings call that over half of their Hispanic customers were concerned about immigration changes. Since the start of President Donald Trump's second term in January, he has cracked down on illegal immigration. In his campaign rally last November, he promised to carry out the "largest deportation program" in American history. Business owners in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations previously told BI that they saw lower footfall because customers feared Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Constellation Brands, which also owns the beer brand Modelo and the wine brand Kim Crawford, saw an overall 6% decline in sales in the latest quarter compared to the year before, with a total revenue of $2.52 billion. The company's wines and spirits category performed worse than its beer category, with a 28% decrease in net sales in the quarter.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Supreme Court Rules 6–3 for Trump, Limits 'Nationwide Injunctions' in Birthright Citizenship Case
The Trump administration scored a notable legal victory today when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that federal district judges "likely exceed" their authority when they issue nationwide injunctions that entirely block federal laws or presidential orders from going into effect while legal challenges play out in court. The case, Trump v. CASA, arose from several lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump's executive order purporting to abolish birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and temporary legal visitors, such as people holding work visas. The federal district judges in those cases had issued nationwide injunctions against Trump's order. "But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them," declared the majority opinion of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. "When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully," Barrett wrote, "the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too." Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, faulted the majority for worrying more about overreaching judges than about an overreaching president. "The majority ignores entirely whether the President's Executive Order is constitutional, instead focusing only on the question of whether federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions," Sotomayor wrote. "Yet the Order's patent unlawfulness reveals the gravity of the majority's error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case. As every conceivable source of law confirms, birthright citizenship is the law of the land." Barrett's ruling took no position on the lawfulness of Trump's executive order. Nor did it weigh in on the soundness of the district court rulings which found that Trump's order had harmed the individual plaintiffs who filed the cases. In other words, the underlying constitutional dispute about whether or not Trump's order violates the 14th Amendment was not revolved today. As Barrett put it, "the birthright citizenship issue is not before us." What Barrett's ruling did do was to order the lower courts to make sure that their injunctions are not "broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue." So, if a pregnant woman successfully sues Trump over his executive order, the district court may still block Trump from denying birthright citizenship to her newborn. But, with nationwide injunctions now off the table, a different mother will now have to file a different lawsuit of her own to obtain the exact same relief for her newborn. Under this scenario, the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship will extend to some newborns but not to others, all depending on whether or not the parents were part of a lawsuit. At the same time, Barrett's ruling did leave open the availability of class-action lawsuits against Trump's executive order. In fact, whether she meant to or not, Barrett effectively invited such suits by referring to nationwide injunctions as a "class-action workaround." In other words, if a class-action lawsuit can achieve similar results to the now-verboten nationwide injunction, we should probably expect a slew of class-actions to be filed immediately against Trump's executive order. And we should also probably expect those class-actions to similarly block Trump's order from going into wide effect while those suits play out. One reason to think that this result will happen is because Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate concurrence today in which he fretted about what he called the class-action "loophole." According to Alito, "the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of 'nationwide class relief,' and today's decision will be of little more than academic interest" if class-action suits are allowed to proliferate against Trump's executive order. In short, the fight over nationwide injunctions may be over for now, but the fight over class-action lawsuits against presidential orders is about to heat up. The post Supreme Court Rules 6–3 for Trump, Limits 'Nationwide Injunctions' in Birthright Citizenship Case appeared first on
