District did not get safety, security grants

By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
OXFORD TWP. – During the regular meeting on Jan. 9, Courtney Makowski, director of budgets for Oxford Schools, gave an update to the board of education on the current grants awarded in the district.
“Every grant that is awarded to the district comes in and it has a very specific set of requirements that we have to follow,” she said. “These are kind of the major pockets that we get.”
Grants that the district currently has fall into five categories: safety, academic, mental health staff, special education and other expenses. These include grants servicing at risk students, early literacy targeted instruction, bilingual education, early literacy teacher coaches, consolidated app, ISD mental health and support services, ESSER grants, breakfast/lunch grants, antiterrorism and emergency assistance program, pupil violence response, career and technical education, CTE incentive payments and career readiness allocation.
“We do get some little grants that I didn’t include, but this is the big bucket of them,” said Makowski. “Most of them are for intervention support.”
This year there have been several new grants awarded to the district, including a per-pupil mental health grant, a grant to address learning loss, a grant to help educate parents and students on FAFSA, state funds for universal school breakfast and lunch, a grant to supplement the increase in transportation costs, and a grant to help fund training future educators.”
Makowski also said there are currently two grants pending application, including a grant for early behavior intervention tools and the FIRST Robotics grant, which the district has gotten in the past.
“We’ve gotten this grant the last several years, but the application has not been approved yet,” she said.
She also gave the school board two grants that the district was denied, including BJS’s STOP School Violence Program and the COPS School Violence Prevention Program grants.
“Those are both safety and security grants,” she said. “Unfortunately, we were not selected. They were competitive grants.”