Grant News

By Elizabeth Evans, Manager of Research & Consultation


The FY26 COPS School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP) opened on June 9, 2026, with up to $73 million total available and roughly 200 awards expected. True, the grant terms look almost identical to last year. However, that doesn't mean you should charge ahead without first reviewing this year's NOFO (Notice of Funding Opportunity)! A few notable requirements have changed, and our recent FY25 funded/unfunded applicant analysis provides a helpful read on what separates a successful applicant from one that stalls out during review.

First, let’s cover some basics.

What changed from FY25 to FY26

This year’s changes cluster in two places: who earns a competitive edge, and what you can spend funds on. Here are the ones worth knowing before you build your competitive application.

• Expanded priority considerations. The list of tie-breakers that can move a competitive application forward when all other aspects are held equal has grown. Applicants that do any (or all) of the following will be given preference:
  • Have comprehensive safety plans that promote mental health professionals and resources at project-impacted
  • Submit accurate race and ethnicity data in NIBRS (the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System).
  • Coordinate with the Homeland Security Task Force (law enforcement applicants only).
• The prior-non-funding preference has shifted. Additional consideration now goes to applicants who did not receive SVPP funding in FY23 through FY25. That window moved forward a year from the FY25 cycle, which looked back to FY22 through FY24, so agencies last funded in FY22 now pick up a preference they would have missed last year.
• A new unallowable item. A historically common request from applicants, vape detection equipment and systems are now named as unallowable costs.
• Clarified drones and fencing costs. Compliant unmanned aircraft systems on the federal Blue UAS Cleared List are now addressed as a conditional, case-by-case purchase rather than a flat unallowable cost, while counter-drone activity remains unallowable. Construction also remains unallowable except for fencing, which is now spelled out as the allowable exception.
• A higher sole-source threshold. Noncompetitive (sole-source) procurements now require prior COPS Office approval above $350,000, up from $250,000 in FY25.

5 things the FY25 applicant pool tells us

Through data obtained following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Grants Office had the opportunity to review a list of all 1,609 applicants to SVPP in FY25. We learned who applied, how much they requested in funding support, and what was said in their project abstract. The COPS Office also shared the reviewers’ scoring for each applicant, regardless of award status. From this data (along with a little internet sleuthing of our own) we were able to glean some interesting lessons, which we’re excited to pass on to you!

The patterns shared below come from comparing the funded against the rest, and they point to a short list of choices that sit squarely within an applicant’s control.

1. Frame hardware needs inside a comprehensive, outcome-led safety plan. The equipment itself does almost nothing to separate funded applications from denied ones. Mention of security cameras, for example, appeared at nearly the same rate in both abstract groups; so the hardware list is a baseline every applicant meets, not a differentiator. What separates the two is the plan the hardware sits inside and the outcome it serves.

Funded abstracts still read differently from denied ones in several measurable ways. They were more likely to describe wraparound or whole-school supports and to talk about sustaining the work. In contrast, denied applicant abstracts more often led with purchase-heavy framing.

Cameras, locks, and radios are the means; however, the real story is about a coordinated approach to a safer school. That coordination emphasis lines up with what SVPP reviewers are scoring for alongside sustainability planning.

FY25 SVPP. Funded n=211. Denied figures reflect unfunded applications across all 1,609 submitted and are materially the same on the scored base.

2. Quantify the problem and the project. Funded abstracts were far more likely to carry concrete numbers, with multi-digit figures appearing in 89.1% of them against 74.1% of denied abstracts. The funded versions were specific about two things: the problem and the plan. They named real incidents anchored in a time and place, such as a particular lockdown or a count of altercations during the prior school year, rather than describing risk in the abstract. They put figures on the project itself, including how many schools and students it would cover and exact counts of the doors, cameras, or buildings the funding would address. Detail like that gives reviewers something concrete to score and signals a project that is ready to build, not just an aspiration.
3. Make the case that you cannot fund this alone. A quarter of your application’s score rides on the Federal Assistance Need section (where you justify that your jurisdiction genuinely cannot pay for this work on its own) and these details are what unfunded abstracts most often gloss over. Funded applicants treated the Federal Assistance Need section as a real case backed by fiscal evidence. About a third of funded abstracts pointed to a concrete socioeconomic or federal high-need marker, against roughly one in ten of the denied. Just as important, funded abstracts noted the federal designations that carry weight, such as persistent-poverty counties and opportunity zones, which barely appeared in denied abstracts at all.

Citation of things like local poverty rates, median household income, and free or reduced-price lunch participation within the impacted schools can help your project stand out. Don’t forget to look up which designations your jurisdiction holds and state them plainly, since a documented inability to self-fund is worth a quarter of your score whether or not your security need is strong.

4. Build a budget that is full enough to compete and clean enough to survive review. Funded applicants asked for more, not less. As the chart shows, the typical funded request sat well above the typical denied one, and a shallow, low-ask budget was one of the weaker profiles last year. To find success, build a budget request in support of your documented needs: closer to the $500,000 cap when warranted, and justify every line. The goal is a fully scoped project, not a padded one.

Just as important, every budget line has to be something actually allowed by SVPP. The program funds physical security and the civilian personnel who run it. Unallowable costs are stripped from applications, and weak technical responsiveness (e.g. missing attachments, incorrect font or margins, including unallowable costs, etc.) can hurt your odds of success before even making it to the reviewer’s desk.

Despite being mentioned more often in funded project abstracts, things like threat assessment teams, anonymous reporting systems and apps, and specialized mental health crisis trainings are considered unallowable costs for SVPP (instead funded by the STOP programs at the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention). Referencing out-of-scope efforts or partnerships as context for your comprehensive plan will strengthen your case, but you cannot budget for them.

5. Remember that how you score matters more than who you are. Raw funding rates varied a lot by applicant type and community, as the following table shows. Tribal and rural applicants were funded at higher rates, but that edge came from scoring higher on average, not from any built-in preference. Once scores are held equal, the community-type advantage essentially disappears.

For a suburban district, or a city- or police-led applicant, the lesson is simple: your organization type is not the obstacle, but your score has to do the work. Once scores are equal across characteristics, all groups fare about the same in their success. While the data cannot tell us why these groups skewed toward lower application scores in FY25, our educated guess is that other factors, such as a poor need justification or a lack of comprehensive approach, were likely at play.

FY25 SVPP funded rates on the all-submitted base (n=1,609). Differences across these groups are explained by score; once score is controlled, applicant type and locale lose their predictive power.

From findings to funded

The FY26 SVPP competition is open now, and the calendar is shorter than it looks. Last year, 84 applications never reached a reviewer because they were withdrawn, found ineligible, or failed technical review, so the surest way to lose is to start late. Confirm your registrations and pull your team together this week, not next month.

Hold your proposal draft against the patterns above and ask the plain questions. Does it frame the hardware inside a real safety plan rather than a purchase order, put numbers on both the problem and the project, make the case that you cannot fund it alone, and rest on a budget that is complete and entirely allowable? Every ‘no’ is a place to revise. And it does not matter whether this is your first SVPP application, a follow-up to a past award, or another run after a denial. The choices that decided FY25 are ones any applicant can make, and we hope these insights help you make them well in FY26.

References

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2026). FY 2026 COPS School Violence Prevention Program (Notice of Funding Opportunity No. O-COPS-2026-172540). U.S. Department of Justice. https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/2026ProgramDocs/svpp/nofo.pdf

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2026). FY 2026 COPS Office School Violence Prevention Program application resource guide. U.S. Department of Justice. https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/2026ProgramDocs/svpp/resource_guide.pdf

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2025). FY25 COPS School Violence Prevention Program (Notice of Funding Opportunity No. O-COPS-2025-172379). U.S. Department of Justice. https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/2025ProgramDocs/svpp/nofo.pdf

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. (2025). FY25 COPS Office School Violence Prevention Program application resource guide. U.S. Department of Justice. https://cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/2025ProgramDocs/svpp/resource_guide.pdf

Grants Office, LLC. (2026). Analysis of FY25 COPS SVPP applicants [Internal analysis of application data obtained from the COPS Office through a Freedom of Information Act request].

About our analysis

Figures reflect Grants Office LLC's analysis of all 1,609 FY25 SVPP applicants, of which 1,525 were scored, and 211 were funded. The score, request amount, organization type, and location figures come from the structured data the COPS Office released, and because all 211 funded applicants were scored, the funded-applicant figures hold whether measured against all 1,609 submissions or only the 1,525 that reached scoring.

Every language and framing pattern in this article, on the other hand, comes from each project's public abstract. The full application narrative, budget, or survey responses were not part of the data we reviewed. We lean on the abstracts on purpose. An abstract is usually written last, once the narrative, budget, and survey are settled, and the NOFO asks it to summarize the project's purpose, primary activities, partners, and beneficiaries in a few hundred words. That makes it a compact mirror of what each applicant chose to emphasize after the rest of the application was done.

Reading 1,609 of them side by side is what surfaces the consistent differences described above. Because an abstract is a summary, these patterns reflect emphasis rather than the complete contents of any one application, and a phrase missing from an abstract was not necessarily missing from the proposal behind it.