Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act

Summary

Prohibits federal funds from being used to hire, maintain, or train law enforcement officers stationed in K–12 schools and amends the COPS grant statute to bar use of those grant funds for school-based officers. Establishes a competitive Department of Education grant program to help school districts replace officers with counselors, mental-health and trauma‑informed staff, restorative practices, and other positive behavioral supports, with requirements for community engagement and stakeholder oversight.

• Prohibits use of any federal funds to hire, maintain, or train law enforcement officers stationed in K–12 schools, including school resource officers.
• Amends the COPS grant statute to bar recipients from using COPS funds to support school‑based law enforcement.
• Creates a Department of Education competitive grant program to help LEAs replace officers with counselors, mental‑health and trauma‑informed staff, and supportive services.
• LEAs must certify they have terminated school‑based law enforcement contracts (or dissolved district police) and agree not to reinstate officers during the grant period.
• Grants require stakeholder oversight and prioritize LEAs that already ended school policing, those with more economically disadvantaged students, and proposals with meaningful community engagement.
• Required grant uses emphasize hiring and training counselors, social workers, psychologists, credible messengers, and other trauma‑informed personnel.
• Permitted uses include restorative justice, positive behavioral interventions, social‑emotional learning, mediation, and ongoing professional development.
• Policy rationale cites research on rising school criminalization, racial and disability disparities in discipline and arrests, and insufficient access to counseling and health staff in many schools.
• Does not itself appropriate money but authorizes grant funding and changes allowable uses of existing public‑safety grants.