The U.S. Department of Education will provide an additional $1.9 million grant to the Newtown, Conn., school district to aid in recovery efforts following a December 2012 shooting at its Sandy Hook Elementary School that left 20 children and six employees dead, the agency announced Monday.
The grant is the second awarded to the district under the agency’s Project School Emergency Response to Violence, or SERV program, which provides funding to assist school districts, colleges, and universities that have experienced traumatic events with the resources they need to recover and to “re-establish safe environments for students,” a release from the Education Department said. Newtown received its first Project SERV award, a $1.3 million grant, in May 2013.
The first grant assisted in the creation of a district-wide academic-and-emotional-recovery plan and helped cover the costs of district responses immediately following the shooting.
The award announced Monday will help fund “additional grief support services for siblings and those who lost their peers; classroom-based psycho-education and skill-building strategies; skill-based interventions for affected students identified as needing assistance for post-traumatic stress reactions, traumatic grief, separation anxiety, and other behavioral and functional problems; tutoring for students demonstrating academic decline since the incident; additional security; additional nursing services; and more,” the news release said.