The U.S. Department of Education is giving Newtown’s public schools another $1.9 million to help with recovery efforts after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012.
The grant comes from the Department’s Project School Emergency Response to Violence program, which provides grants to schools that have experienced a significant traumatic event and need resources to respond, recover and re-establish safe environments for students. Twenty students and six staff members were killed during the shooting.
Newtown received a $1.3 million grant in May and this second grant will go toward additional grief support services for siblings and those who lost their peers, as well as classroom-based psychoeducation and skill-building strategies. Other programs to be funded by the grant include skill-based interventions for affected students identified as needing assistance for posttraumatic stress reactions, traumatic grief, separation anxiety and other behavioral and functional problems. It will also go toward tutoring for students demonstrating academic decline since the shooting; additional security; additional nursing services; and more.
“We will do whatever we can to continue assisting and supporting the healing and recovery of Newtown,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement. “This additional grant will help students, teachers, families, school district and community move forward after such an unimaginable tragedy.”
The Project SERV grant program has awarded more than $34 million through 113 grants, including Newtown’s additional grant, since the program began in 2001. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/dvppserv/index.html.
