Applying for School Safety and Security Grant Funding

by Sara Graves

We recently reached out to Jessica Cirulli, subject matter expert and grant advisor at Drift Net, a company that works directly with schools to help them apply for school safety and security grant funding at no cost. In this first part of a three-part series, we discuss how schools and school districts can get better prepared to apply for school safety and security grant money.

As we learned from Cirulli, every school safety and security grant has an application and approval process. The window to apply for these grants is short—typically one month to six weeks, and since multiple schools either statewide or nationwide apply for the same state/federal grant funding, the process can be extremely competitive.

For instance, one state allocated a $5 million school grant to disperse to the state’s schools, which proved insufficient when schools applied for funding to cover upgrades, leading to a requested amount of $99 million.

Because of limited funding at the state’s disposal, states are very deliberate with allocation, and the threshold for the quality and exactness of an application is very high. Seemingly trivial things such as “grammatical errors and extra spaces, not capitalizing the first letter in a sentence, single spacing versus double spacing, the (look of the) final PDFs,” can be enough for a school to be automatically eliminated from contention for a grant, Cirulli explains.

For that reason, Drift Net experts, who have assisted hundreds of schools and saved them millions of dollars at no cost, offer free training, resources, and guidance to school officials, “so those schools will be in a much better position to get grant approval,” Cirulli says.

In addition, they have developed their own, comprehensive solutions called KnowWhere Campus Safety System and KnowWhat Safety Management System, available for purchase at driftnet.com. Yet, as she stresses, schools are in no way required to purchase Drift Net’s products to receive their grant assistance. “We never say, ‘We will only help you if...’”

Each school working with Drift Net will receive a free grant workbook to guide school leadership through the entire grant process: assisting with identifying grant funding opportunities, achieving eligibility for the grant, and strategies to effectively allocate funding.

The school official or department tasked with applying for the grant will then need to build a team of people who are directly relevant to the specific funding they are applying for. For example, if a school district is applying for a grant to finance new threat-reporting software, they would want to have their director of IT represented on the team.

Before entering the application process, schools should seek out their state’s grant management system and sign up to receive regular updates regarding upcoming grants and grant legislation. They should also apply for a UEI (Commercial and Government Entity Code-formerly known as a DUNS number) here.

Having these tasks completed will provide a baseline of readiness so schools aren’t scrambling to get organized when a grant opportunity is presented. Increasingly, these grants are being offered in multiple rounds for state grant funding, so schools will have more than one opportunity to apply, Cirulli adds.

Every state is eligible to apply for federal grants, which usually cater to public schools unless specific requirements are outlined. However, many of these are matching grants, where schools are required to put in a certain percentage of their own funding to ‘match’ the grant’s funding. While states are more likely to cater to rural and low-income school communities through non-matching funding, federal funding has generally been 'matching' in the previous decade.

Cirulli advises that all schools or districts complete a Risk and Vulnerability Assessment prior to grant application. This assessment, which can take weeks to complete if part of a larger district, helps a school identify the unique needs of the school and its most-vulnerable areas. As Cirulli explains, the assessment is important because it helps connect the needs of the school community to what is provided on the grant. Each grant will specify what the funds can be used for (SRO assistance, equipment, mental health, adding tech/software, etc.), and having data-backed evidence of a school’s needs through a Risk and Vulnerability Assessment will help substantiate that school’s grant application.

For example, if a school is seeing an uptick in self-harm, Cirulli explains, a grant-ready school would compile the data from their Suicide and Self-Harm Risk Assessments, which will justify the expense of bolstering their student wellness initiatives, hiring more mental health professionals, or whatever else the grant specifies as a valid use of the funding. “Schools should be maximizing and prioritizing their funding allocation based on need. The needs have to connect to the allocated funding of the grant.”

It’s important that schools prepare for grant funding with an up-to-date Emergency Operations Plan (EOP), which details how a school will prepare, react and recover in an emergency situation. The EOP should be kept as current and up to date as possible. In fact, Cirulli recommends that schools have their EOPs updated every six months to a year. Completing an EOP will necessitate schools having all memorandums of understanding (MOUs) and mutual aid agreements (MAAs) updated and signed, which if neglected, can become an enormous time-burden when a grant funding opportunity is presented.

To keep schools current on legislation being introduced at the federal or state level, Drift Net provides the tools and guidance to stay informed about the latest news or developments, from every stage of the grant’s legislative process, the grant’s timeframe, eligibility requirements, and every detail in between.

If a school has completed the above preparation steps, it’s possible that the application could only take a few days to complete, Cirulli adds.

In the second part of this three-part series, we will discuss the grant application process in greater detail.