Federal funding roller coaster for SCOPE leads to push for state funding

When Socorro County Options, Prevention and Education (SCOPE) received an unexpected and abrupt termination notice on its $300,000 grant, Samantha Winter, SCOPE coordinator and grant director, said her team felt blindsided.

“I cried,” Winter said, To have it pulled out from us cold turkey, not only was our programming in question, but also the trust the community has in us.”

SCOPE is a non-profit based in Socorro with the mission to promote healthy lifestyles, address mental health and substance misuse and collaborate with stakeholders to address needs in the community.

The federal grant was from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA) and supported key SCOPE Health Council programs such as Thrive365, Wellness Wednesday movies, staff salaries and community outreach initiatives.

Winter said they received the termination notice for their SAMHSA grant around 8 p.m. on January 12, without any advance warning from their federal grant manager. She said it was communicated directly from SAMHSA in a series of four emails, which was highly unusual and confusing.

In an effort to figure out why the grant had been rescinded in this fashion, she found some articles in the national news about the sudden cuts.

“The Trump administration was taking a hard look at mental health plans and addiction services, talking about the viability of these programs and if they were effective or not, and that they did not align with his administration’s goals, and so they just did an immediate cut,” Winters said.

The notice required them to stop all use of the grant funds after January 13, with only 30 days to reimburse existing expenses. However, Winters said, the supposed “30-day notice” was declared effective immediately—meaning there was no real warning period.

Within 24 hours of the termination of funds, Winter said there was a national outcry and media coverage. A judge ruled the Trump administration overstepped in immediately cutting the funds.

By midday on January 14, SCOPE received a new notice from SAMHSA requesting that it disregard all previous termination correspondence. However, their legal Notice of Award had already been uploaded, showing the grant as terminated. During the paperwork processing window, about two and a half days in total, SCOPE technically had no grant funding.

This prompted a roller coaster ride, said Winter, leading to emergency board meetings and contingency planning focused on either scaling back operations or finding alternative funding sources.

“This is technically the fourth roller coaster. However, this is the first time we’ve had a full termination notice.” Winter said.

To prevent this type of funding crisis from happening again, Winter said they are pushing for recurring, stable state-level funding. This would enable longer-term sustainability planning rather than constantly facing annual uncertainties, said Winter.

“I’ll be at the Roundhouse next week. I’ll be at Santa Fe on Monday through Wednesday, pushing that House Bill 104. We’ve got the Statewide Health Council meeting on Monday and Tuesday, and then we’ve got public health day at the Roundhouse on Wednesday,” Winter said.

She said they are also earmarking and applying for several smaller foundational grants as a contingency plan, aiming to patch operations and provide a backup if large federal grants are cut or delayed.

“Our plan was essentially to stop program growth, focus on maintaining and trying to go after some of these smaller foundational grants to very much kind of patchwork us and get us through until we ... could come up with a complete package to kind of keep operations going,” Winter said.

As far as programs such as SCOPE being questioned on their effectiveness on a federal level, Winter said SCOPE is methodical and data-driven.

“We do want the community members to know that we are doing evidence based, data driven approaches,” Winter said.

Project AWARE

At the Socorro School Board meeting on Monday, Superintendent Joyce Gormley said when they received the email the Project AWARE grant funds were suddenly frozen it was a cause for significant concern as three positions were funded by the grant including a clinician, a project manager and a navigator.

The federal grant Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education) is a program managed by SAMHSA with the objective to create sustainable, school-based mental health services for children.

The district had to quickly consider contingency plans for those staff members, said Gormley. However, about an hour later, they received another notification stating the funds would be available until the end of the year after all.

“That just shows how volatile dependency on these dollars are,” Gormley told the school board, “I have confidence that that grant is going away. I mean, they already pulled it and they gave it back. They’re not going to refund that again.”

She raised the question of how the district might fund these mental health positions once the grant truly ends.