A federal lawsuit also naming U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon alleges the Department of Education unlawfully withdrew four years of promised grant funding from the district.
The complaint says the grant supported school-based mental health services for students in rural Humboldt County.
Although the grant was supposed to last for five years, the department announced in April that funding would end this December, after only one year.
Amanda Mangaser Savage, strategic litigation counsel at the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel, which represents the McKinleyville Union School District, said ending the grant will harm students.
"We believe that having adequate care for trauma is necessary to access education," she said. "[This decision] treats these kids who have very real needs as just totally disposable and sacrifices their livelihoods, their lives, their well-being, their care on the altar, basically, of ideological grandstanding."
According to the complaint, the department told the district that the grant conflicted with the current administration's policy priorities. The complaint argues that federal law requires continuation decisions to be based solely on grantee performance.
The district expected to receive about $7.1 million over five years under the grant, but it will only receive $1.2 million this year.
The McKinleyville Union School District and U.S. Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
The Department reopened the grant program, but the complaint says McKinleyville no longer qualifies under the new eligibility definitions.
The complaint says the rural region has high rates of poverty and childhood trauma and serves a significant number of Native students, making school-based mental health resources especially crucial.
Schools are often the only source of mental health care for many students, the complaint reads. By high school, more than 20% of the students in Humboldt County report they have considered suicide.
The Lost Coast Outpost reported that a student died by suicide on the McKinleyville campus in 2019.
Mangaser Savage said lives are at stake.
"For students who need these services but aren't getting them, there's just no replacement," she said. "It's not like the school has funds in its back pocket that it can use to make these otherwise unavailable services available."
The lawsuit seeks to restore the grant funding and to declare the department's actions unlawful.
