Cruel cuts slam safety: Chuck

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S budget would slash $425 million for school safety and mental health programs, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday, as he vowed to fight to reverse the cuts.

The New York Democrat and Senate minority leader blasted a White House spending plan released just two days before the Florida school shooting in which 17 people died.

“To know we have a budget pieced together that undermines the Department of Education on so many levels to prevent the next Parkland tragedy is nails on a chalkboard,” Schumer said at an evening press conference in his Manhattan office.

Trump’s budget proposal for the 2019 fiscal year would eliminate the School Emergency Response to Violence Program, which funds guidance counseling and trauma relief.

The Newtown, Conn., school district got $6.4 million from that program in the three years following the Sandy Hook school shooting, while $350,000 went to Baltimore after a student was killed. The program also delivered $1 million to city schools in 2013 after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the region, and another $500,000 to New York schools affected by the storm.

Survivors of the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting massacre would be entitled to the same funding, Schumer said.

The budget blueprint also proposes scrapping “project prevention grants” and the $400 million Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grant program.