Grant News

By: Christina Fernandez and Sam Rawdon

The COPS School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP), administered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, was established to help schools improve safety through evidence-based security enhancements, training, coordination with law enforcement, and community partnerships. Since 2018, SVPP has provided over $379 million in funding. The program has been appropriated through 2028.

Over time, SVPP has evolved into a highly competitive national program that increasingly emphasizes collaboration, rural access, and scalable impact. This analysis looks at key quantitative trends from 2020 through 2025 to better understand how SVPP has evolved and what those shifts signal for future applicants.

Funding Levels, Demand, and Award Distribution

From 2020 to 2022, total funds available through SVPP increased from $50 million to $73 million, reflecting additional federal investment in school safety through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Since 2022, funding has remained the same at $73 million annually. Though funding levels have remained the same, applicant demand has increased causing  awards to become significantly more competitive from year to year.

Applicant volume fluctuated early in the five-year period, dropping from 502 applicants in 2020 to just 285 in 2021, before rebounding sharply. By 2023 and 2024, applications exceeded 1,000 annually, and in 2025 the program received a staggering 1,609 applications. In 2021 and 2022, SVPP was comparatively accessible. More than half of applicants were awarded funding—53% in 2021 and 58% in 2022—making these the least competitive years in the five-year period. As demand accelerated, competitiveness increased sharply. In both 2023 and 2024, just 20% of applicants received awards, despite funding levels remaining unchanged. The trend peaked in 2025, when only 13% of applicants were funded, making it by far the most competitive year in the program’s recent history.

Despite major swings in applicant volume, the number of awards made each year has remained relatively consistent, ranging between 153 and 235 awards annually. Award amounts have also remained relatively stable over the five-year period, generally ranging between $300,000 to $360,000 per award.  Rather than expanding the number of grants in response to rising demand, the COPS Office maintained a consistent award volume, reinforcing the increasingly selective nature of the program. Beginning in 2021, the program also introduced microgrants, awarding between 7 and 14 microgrants per year. While microgrants represent a small share of total awards, they reflect SVPP’s effort to support tribal and low-resourced school districts.

SVPP appears to have steadily shifted from a program focused on broad participation to one defined by deliberate selectivity. Rather than increasing the number of awards to keep pace with growing interest, the COPS Office has consistently maintained award size and volume. This suggests a clear preference for funding projects that can be fully implemented as proposed. As competition intensified, this approach naturally favored applications that showed strong readiness, tight alignment with statutory purpose, and a clear, well-documented connection between identified risks and proposed solutions.

Data also points to a growing emphasis on equity and capacity, particularly for rural, tribal, and low-resourced communities. As application pressure increased, these jurisdictions consistently rose to the top. This is likely because they could clearly demonstrate limited local funding options, infrastructure challenges, and public safety needs that SVPP was designed to address. The introduction of microgrants reinforces this trend, signaling an effort to preserve access for smaller or under-resourced applications even as overall competition tightened. Taken together, recent award patterns suggest that SVPP is no longer just funding school safety projects broadly, but strategically directing federal dollars where they are almost likely to be meaningful, defensible, and impactful.

Rurality and Geographic Reach

One of the most striking trends across the five-year period is the growing emphasis on rural communities. In 2020, rural applicants received 50% of awards. By 2025, that figure had risen steadily to 76%. This shift highlights SVPP’s intentional prioritization of rural and underserved areas, where schools often face unique safety challenges and fewer alternative funding sources. Importantly, this rural emphasis persisted even as competition intensified, suggesting that rurality has become a defining factor in award decisions. Geographically, SVPP has maintained broad national reach overall. Each year, awards were distributed across 47 to 50 states, demonstrating the program’s consistent commitment to nationwide impact rather than regional concentration.

One clear takeaway from this trend is that SVPP has quietly changed the playing field for non-rural applicants. As rural communities have become a stronger priority, suburban and urban jurisdictions can no longer count on size, enrollment, or general crime data to carry an application. Instead, they’re being held to a higher bar, expected to clearly explain what makes their situation different, where local capacity falls short, and why federal support would truly move the needle. At the same time, SVPP’s consistent nationwide reach shows that simply being in an underrepresented state isn’t enough anymore. Nearly every state sees awards each year, but only a small share of applicants stand out. Together, these patterns suggest the program has shifted away from balancing geography and toward funding projects where equity, need, and impact are most clearly demonstrated.

Schools and Students Impacted

While the number of awards has remained fairly steady, the scale of impact has varied widely depending on the structure of funded projects.

Earlier years, such as 2020 and 2021, saw high numbers of schools and students impacted, largely due to district-wide awards and large-scale initiatives. That trend continued into 2025. Funded projects impacted more than 44,000 schools and over 2 million students—a significant jump from the prior year. This sharp increase strongly suggests a shift toward partnership-based applications, regional consortia, and shared-service models that allow a single award to benefit a much larger footprint. The 2025 data further highlights how strongly the COPS Office now prioritizes collaborative approaches that maximize reach and scalability.

One implication of this shift toward larger-scale, collaborative projects is that SVPP is increasingly rewarding applicants that think beyond individual campuses and frame school safety as a shared, regional responsibility. As partnership-based and consortium models become more common, applicants that can coordinate across different districts, agencies, or service providers may be better positioned to compete than those pursuing single-site solutions. This also raises the bar for project planning, since larger footprints require clearer governance, stronger coordination, and most robust implementation plans to be credible. Over time, this trend may make it harder for stand-alone schools or small districts to compete on their own unless they can demonstrate either acute risk or a model that could be replicated elsewhere, thus reinforcing SVPP’s broader move toward scalable, system-level impact rather than isolated improvements.

What you need to do to be competitive for next round/ tips for applying:

To stay competitive for future SVPP funding, applicants need to approach the program as a highly competitive grant that rewards clear, well-justified projects, not broad or general school safety wish lists. With low award rates, applications need to stay tightly focused on documented risk reduction, with every requested item clearly tied to a real need. Strong proposals are built around a recent, site-specific security assessment that clearly outlines threats, vulnerabilities, and gaps, and then directly connects each expense back to those findings. Reviewers are increasingly drawn to projects that focus on the highest-risk locations, avoid lumping unrelated upgrades together, and take a realistic, phased approach instead of trying to do everything at once.

Applicants also need to align with DOJ’s strong focus on rural communities by clearly explaining challenges like limited resources, aging facilities, and response-time issues when applicable. Suburban and urban applicants should not assume eligibility alone is enough and must clearly show what makes their risk environment unique and why local resources fall short. Technology requests should be explained as practical tools to address specific risks—not as system upgrades—and should include a clear plan for how the technology will be used and maintained long-term. Matching funds must be easy to understand, clearly documented, and tied directly to eligible costs, since confusion around matches is a common reason applications fall out of contention. Overall, the most competitive applications show they are ready to move quickly, avoid questionable or weakly justified costs, and are written with federal reviewers in mind, clear, straightforward, and focused on measurable need and impact.