Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION <CFR>34 CFR Chapter II</CFR> <DEPDOC>[Docket ID ED-2025-OESE-0153]</DEPDOC> <SUBJECT>Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education. <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Proposed priorities, requirements, and definitions. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Department of Education (Department) proposes priorities, requirements, and definitions under the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program (MHSP), Assistance Listing Number (ALN) 84.184X. The Department may use these priorities, requirements, and definitions for competitions in fiscal year (FY) 2025 and later years. The proposed priorities, requirements, and definitions are designed to better target activities designed to address shortages of school-based mental health services providers, specifically school psychologists, in high-need local educational agencies (LEAs). These priorities, requirements, and definitions are intended to replace the Notice of Final Priorities, Requirements, and Definitions published in the <E T="04">Federal Register</E> on October 4, 2022 (87 FR 60083). However, those priorities, requirements, and definitions remain in effect for previous grant competitions in which the notices inviting applications (NIAs) were published before the Department finalizes the proposed priorities, requirements, and definitions in this notice. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> We must receive your comments on or before August 18, 2025. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> Comments must be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal at <E T="03">www.Regulations.gov.</E> See the <E T="02">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION</E> section for more details. <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Dana Carr, U.S. Department of Education, 400 Maryland Avenue SW, Room 4B210, Washington, DC 20202. Telephone:(202) 987-0119. Email: <E T="03">Mental.Health@ed.gov.</E> If you are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability and wish to access telecommunications relay services, please dial 7-1-1. </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <E T="03">Invitation to Comment:</E> We invite you to submit comments regarding the proposed priorities, requirements, and definitions. Comments must be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal at <E T="03">www.Regulations.gov.</E> However, if you require an accommodation or cannot otherwise submit your comments via <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> , please contact the program contact person listed under <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> . The Department will not accept comments submitted by fax or by email, or comments submitted after the comment period closes. To ensure the Department does not receive duplicate copies, please submit your comments only once. In addition, please include the Docket ID at the top of your comments. <E T="03">Federal eRulemaking Portal:</E> Go to <E T="03">www.Regulations.gov</E> to submit your comments electronically. Information on using <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> , including instructions for accessing agency documents, submitting comments, and viewing the docket, is available on the site under “FAQ.” Also included on <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> is a commenter checklist that addresses how to submit effective comments. In instances where individual submissions appear to be duplicates or near duplicates of comments prepared as part of a writing campaign, the Department may choose to post to <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> one representative sample comment along with the total comment count for that campaign. The Department will consider these comments along with all other comments received. In instances where individual submissions are bundled together (submitted as a single document or packaged together), the Department will post all of the substantive comments included in the submissions along with the total comment count for that document or package to <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> . Comments containing personal threats will not be posted to <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> and may be referred to the appropriate authorities. During and after the comment period, you may inspect public comments about these proposed priorities, requirements, and definitions by accessing <E T="03">Regulations.gov</E> . To inspect comments in person, please contact the person listed under <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> . <E T="03">Privacy Note:</E> The Department's policy is generally to make all comments received from members of the public available for public viewing in their entirety on the Federal eRulemaking Portal at <E T="03">www.Regulations.gov.</E> Therefore, commenters should be careful to include in their comments only information that they wish to make publicly available. <E T="03">Assistance to Individuals with Disabilities in Reviewing the Rulemaking Record:</E> On request we will provide an appropriate accommodation or auxiliary aid to an individual with a disability who needs assistance to review the comments or other documents in the public rulemaking record for the proposed priorities, requirements, and definitions. If you want to schedule an appointment for this type of accommodation or auxiliary aid, please contact the person listed under <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> . <E T="03">Purpose of Program:</E> The MHSP program provides competitive grants to State educational agencies (SEAS)(as defined in 20 U.S.C. 7801(30)) and LEAs (as defined in 20 U.S.C. 7801(49)) to address the shortage of <E T="03">credentialed</E>   <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> school-based mental health services providers, specifically school psychologists, in <E T="03">high-need LEAs.</E> <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  Terms with proposed definitions elsewhere in this notice are italicized the first time they are used. </FTNT> <E T="03">Assistance Listing Number:</E> 84.184X. <E T="03">Program Authority:</E> Section 4631(a)(1)(B) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended (ESEA) (20 U.S.C. 7281(a)(1)(B)). <E T="03">Background:</E> Our Nation's schools should be safe and secure settings where children can learn and grow to their full potential. However, over the last several years the decline of children and youth mental health has become a serious concern for our Nation. Given the importance of improving child and youth mental health, we are proposing three priorities aimed at increasing State and local capacity to improve students' mental health. Two of the proposed priorities are intended to provide funding to allow SEAs and LEAs to develop innovative and tailored strategies to enhance their school psychologist workforce pipeline. Evidence suggests that increasing the number of available school psychologists is related to enhanced mental or behavior health services provision for students. <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> Additionally, the estimated student to school psychologist ratio for the 2023-2024 school year was 1065:1. To further meet the need for targeted mental health services, the Department proposes a third priority intended to increase the number of credentialed school psychologists available to provide <E T="03">early intervention mental health services</E> and <E T="03">intensive mental health services</E> to students most in need of those services. <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>  Eklund, K., DeMarchena, S.L., Rossen, E., Izumi, J.T., Vaillancourt, K., & Rader Kelly, S. (2020). Examining the role of school psychologists as providers of mental and behavioral health services. <E T="03">Psychology in the Schools, 57,</E> 489-501. Available at: <E T="03">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pits.22323.</E> Accessed on June 10, 2025. </FTNT> To support effective implementation of the proposed priorities and administration of the program, and to maximize the benefit of these Federal funds, the Department proposes application and program requirements. The proposed application requirements are intended to ensure that the LEAs benefiting from the MHSP program are high-need LEAs, and to provide data on how many school psychologists the applicant anticipates training and placing with grant funds in comparison to the number currently delivering services. The Department proposes program requirements intended to limit the amount of funds that can be used for administrative costs, require that program funds be used to supplement, not supplant, non-Federal funds, and prohibit the use of program funds for promoting or endorsing gender ideology, political activism, racial stereotyping, or hostile environments for students of particular races. The Department also proposes a requirement for grantees to leverage partnerships that are designed to coordinate consistent, high-quality training for new school psychologists. The Department proposes a requirement that these partnerships are formalized through an agreement within six months of the grant award. Additionally, given the importance of student safety and privacy, and of ensuring the protection of parental rights, the Department proposes requirements related to compliance with existing laws and obtaining parents' informed written consent for any mental-health assessment or service funded under this program. Finally, to support the proposed priorities and requirements, the Department proposes elsewhere in this notice definitions for the following terms used in this program: “credentialed,” “early intervention mental health services,” “eligible institution of higher education partner,” “high-need LEA,” “intensive mental health services, “school psychology graduate candidate,” and “school-based mental health ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 27k characters. 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