The Republican Party Defunded Your Kid’s Mental Health Support. Let’s Talk About That.

While children across America struggle through a mental health crisis, Republican leadership at the state and federal level has systematically pulled the funding that schools desperately need. From Cincinnati to California, this is a political choice — and it demands a political answer.

Let’s be clear from the start: the school districts cutting mental health staff are not the villains of this story. They are institutions doing their best with budgets that have been left to collapse — trying to serve a very real, very urgent crisis with resources that state and federal government have failed to provide. The Republican Party, at both the state and federal level, has spent years ignoring, underfunding, and in some cases actively blocking the very investments that could prevent what is now happening in classrooms across this country. The schools didn’t create this situation. They’re the ones left to absorb the consequences of it.

Cincinnati Public Schools is facing cuts to roughly two dozen social worker positions, 16 counselors, and nine resource coordinators. Districts like Fairfield City Schools and New Richmond Schools in Clermont County have already eliminated their school psychologists and mental health counselors after levy proposals failed at the ballot box in early May. Two-thirds of Ohio school levies failed this cycle. Two thirds. And rather than stepping in with state or federal support, the political powers that have controlled Ohio’s government for decades — and have controlled Congress for stretches of the last several years — have offered no meaningful solution. No emergency funding. No structural response. No acknowledgment that when local communities can’t carry this weight alone, it becomes a state and federal responsibility to step in.

Student mental health does not sustain itself. It requires consistent, deliberate public investment — the kind that Republican leadership has repeatedly chosen not to provide.

A Crisis They Helped Create, Then Refused to Fund

Here’s the timeline. During the pandemic, schools finally received significant federal investment in student mental health services through relief funding. And it worked. Schools hired social workers, counselors, and psychologists. Kids who had never had access to mental health support suddenly did. Administrators saw the difference. Educators saw the difference. Students felt the difference.

Then the money ran out. And when advocates, educators, and mental health experts went to Congress and to Republican-controlled state legislatures asking for that investment to continue, the answer was no — wrapped in the language of fiscal responsibility. But there is nothing fiscally responsible about dismantling the infrastructure that keeps children stable enough to learn, grow, and stay in school.

“The pandemic just highlighted that need. That need has not gone away because the pandemic has gone away.”

That’s Deb Robison, director of outreach for the Ohio School-Based Center of Excellence for Prevention & Intervention at Miami University. She’s right. The mental health crisis in our schools existed long before COVID. The pandemic stripped away the coping mechanisms kids had and left them exposed. Schools stepped up when the funding arrived. And then, when that funding expired, the government — specifically, the party that has made cutting public services a core part of its platform — stepped back and let it evaporate without a replacement plan.

The Numbers Are Not Ambiguous

The Health Policy Institute of Ohio published data showing exactly what the landscape looks like for students right now:

1 in 5 Ohio middle schoolers reported poor mental health most or all of the time in 2023

1 in 3 Ohio high schoolers reported poor mental health — rates even higher among girls, LGBTQ+ students, and low-income youth

If CPS proceeds with its proposed cuts, that enormous need will be met by a ratio of one social worker for every 800 students. The nationally recommended ratio is 1:250. This is not a minor adjustment to services. This is a near-complete elimination of the support system for students in crisis. And it is being allowed to happen because the political will to fund it simply does not exist in the current Republican-led policy environment.

1 : 800 Projected social worker-to-student ratio at Cincinnati Public Schools under proposed cuts. The nationally recommended ratio is 1:250. That gap represents hundreds of children who will have nowhere to turn.

This Is Not Just Cincinnati. This Is America.

If you think this is a Cincinnati problem or an Ohio problem, it isn’t. This is the predictable result of a decades-long Republican policy agenda that has treated public education funding as government overreach and student mental health as a matter of personal or family responsibility — not a public good worth protecting. That philosophy has consequences, and we are watching them unfold in real time.

• Texas: Among the lowest per-pupil education spending in the nation; Republican leadership has repeatedly blocked expansion of school mental health funding despite a documented surge in student crisis incidents.
• Florida: Gov. DeSantis’s administration has cut mental health programming in schools while redirecting public education dollars through voucher programs that reduce district budgets.
• Tennessee & Missouri: Republican legislatures have blocked federal mental health funding streams tied to LGBTQ+ inclusive support programs — leaving the most at-risk students without services.
• Congress: Republican efforts to cut Medicaid — the single largest funder of children’s mental health services in America — would devastate school-based mental health programs from coast to coast.
• Nationally: The American School Counselor Association recommends a 1:250 counselor-to-student ratio. The national average hovers around 1:408. In states with Republican legislative supermajorities, it is often significantly worse.

This is not a series of unrelated local budget crunches. This is the cumulative result of a political ideology that has, for years, systematically reduced funding for public schools and then pointed to struggling schools as evidence that public education doesn’t work. The schools aren’t failing. They’re being set up to fail.

The Real Cost of “Saving Money”

Let’s be direct about what cutting school mental health services actually costs — because it does not save money. It moves the cost elsewhere, later, and at far greater expense.

When you remove the counselors, social workers, and school psychologists — the professionals who identify struggling students early and connect them with support — those students do not simply manage on their own. They fall behind. They act out. They get suspended, expelled, and eventually drop out. They end up in emergency rooms, juvenile systems, and, years down the road, adult correctional facilities. Every one of those outcomes carries a cost that dwarfs a counselor’s annual salary many times over.

As Robison noted clearly: more suspensions, more expulsions, more chronic absenteeism. This is not a theoretical outcome. It is a documented pattern that has repeated itself everywhere these services have been reduced. The Republican Party has been told this by researchers, educators, pediatricians, and mental health professionals. The information is not hidden. The choice to defund anyway is deliberate.

“I think we will see more situations where students are suspended or expelled from school. I think we’ll see more situations where absenteeism is on the rise.”

The Kids Who Will Pay the Highest Price

It’s important to be specific about who is most harmed when these services disappear — because it is never the students who were already doing well. The data is clear: girls are reporting the highest rates of poor mental health among high schoolers. LGBTQ+ students depend on school counselors as trusted, sometimes the only, safe adult in their building. Low-income students rely on school-based mental health professionals because private therapy is simply not financially accessible to their families — and the Republican Party has spent years opposing the Medicaid expansions that might otherwise close that gap.

When GOP leadership cuts school mental health funding, the impact is not evenly distributed. It falls hardest on the children with the fewest alternatives. That is not an unintended side effect. It is the foreseeable outcome of a policy that treats mental health care as optional.

What Needs to Happen Now

The Cincinnati Public Schools Board of Education has not yet voted on the proposed cuts. There is still time for parents, educators, students, and community members to speak up. Contact your school board representatives. Contact your state legislators. Contact your members of Congress. Make clear that children’s mental health is not a budget line to be quietly eliminated — it is a fundamental part of what it means to support young people through one of the most critical periods of their development.

Beyond Cincinnati, the same pressure needs to be applied everywhere. Every election, every school board meeting, every budget hearing is an opportunity to demand that elected leaders — especially those at the Republican-controlled state and federal level — answer directly for what has been taken from students and what they intend to do about it.

Our children are not a budget problem. Their mental health is not a luxury. It is the foundation on which everything else they are supposed to accomplish in school is built. And the political leadership that continues to treat it as expendable needs to be held accountable — at every level, in every cycle, for as long as it takes.

The kids are watching. And they deserve better than this.

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Sources: WVXU / 91.7 Cincinnati Public Radio, reporting by Zack Carreon (May 13, 2026); Health Policy Institute of Ohio Child Mental Health Data Brief (2024); American School Counselor Association; National Association of Social Workers.