New School Safety Grant–Project Prevent–Opened Today!

One of the brand new ED School Safety Grants the Insight Team has been watching for, Project Prevent, opened today. Applications are due 6/30/14.

This program is focused on supporting schools in communities of high violence or schools with high violence in them through mental health professionals who provide students with counseling and referrals to partnering community agencies, training for staff, and proven-effective violence and risk behavior prevention and reduction programming. The Federal Register Notice seems to indicate that violence includes community violence like shootings, as well as domestic violence and other child abuse issues.

Local Educational Agencies (public school districts and charter schools that are designated Local Educational Agencies by their states) are eligible to apply.

Awards are for up to 5 years. The award size is $250,000-$1,000,000 (probably per year but the Federal Register Notice isn’t entirely clear about that; we’ve submitted a question). There is no matching requirement. About 20 awards are anticipated.

Applicants proposing to serve one or more high-poverty schools (schools with student populations with 50% or more of the students living in poverty based on free/reduced lunch numbers or other poverty indicators acceptable through the ESEA) can qualify for three bonus points via Competitive Preference Priority 1 provided they indicate they are responding to the Priority in their abstracts and list the high-poverty schools participating in their projects in their narratives. Also, Competitive Preference Priority 2 allows for three bonus points as well if the district is coordinating with a federally designated Promise Zone.

We’ve asked the contact if the grant will fund school safety staff such as School Resource Officers or school safety equipment such as new doors, locks, and cameras and are currently waiting to hear more on this.

Here’s the link to the Federal Register Notice, which actually provides tons of information on the program: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/04/29/2014-09604/applications-for-new-awards-project-prevent-grant-program

The full RFP should be available tomorrow via grants.gov.

School Climate Transformation and Full Service Community Schools Grants will probably also be released later this week or next week. We’ll keep you updated on those right here on the Insight blog.

If you’d like to apply for this grant with Insight’s assistance, please contact us ASAP and we’ll send information on the cost of services. Given the limited number of awards anticipated, we’ll support a limited number of applicants to be fair to all. Further, two months is actually not long at all to prepare an application of this magnitude, and the program will likely be very, very competitive. Anyone looking to apply will want to start ASAP to have the best possible chance! Good luck!