The bill amends the Public Health Service Act to authorize a new federal grant program—administered by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in consultation with the Secretary of Education—to establish or expand comprehensive, school-based violence prevention programs targeted to youth at highest risk for involvement in gun violence. Grants must fund evidence-based, culturally and developmentally appropriate strategies delivered through partnerships between state educational agencies, local education agencies, and community-based nonprofits; Bureau of Indian Education schools are explicitly eligible.
The law sets eligibility thresholds tied to local homicide or violent-crime rates, requires multi-year (five-year) awards, mandates data collection and evaluation (with periodic public reporting and independent evaluations), and authorizes $25 million annually for fiscal years 2025–2031. The structure prioritizes prevention services, trauma-informed supports, community partnerships, and measurement—but also creates implementation and measurement trade-offs that agencies and school partners will need to manage.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill directs HHS, working with ED, to award grants to eligible partnerships to implement or expand school-based violence prevention programs that use evidence-based, culturally competent and trauma-informed strategies. Grants may also support technical assistance, community partnerships, professional development for school staff, and required data collection.
Who It Affects
State educational agencies and local educational agencies in high-violence jurisdictions must form partnerships with community-based nonprofits to apply; Bureau of Indian Education-funded schools are included. HHS and ED take on evaluation and dissemination duties, and independent researchers receive authority to evaluate selected projects.
Why It Matters
This creates a dedicated federal funding stream focused on youth at highest risk of gun violence and ties service delivery to measurable outcomes, potentially shifting capacity and accountability toward community-school partnerships and evidence-based prevention rather than security-only responses.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill repurposes and renames a portion of title V of the Public Health Service Act to establish a new grant program for school-based violence prevention. HHS will run the program and must consult with the Department of Education.
Eligible applicants are not individual schools but partnerships that include a State educational agency (working with one or more local educational agencies) and at least one community-based nonprofit that serves the youth targeted by the program. The statute expressly covers schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Education, which brings tribal education contexts into eligibility.
Grant-funded activities are broad but targeted: grantees should implement strategies shown to reduce youth violence—programs emphasizing healing from trauma, social-emotional skill development, connections to mental health and crisis-intervention professionals (including community violence interrupters), community engagement, and interventions that reduce escalation of harm. The statute also permits funding for technical assistance, partnership-building, and professional development for teachers and school leaders to expand access to trauma support and social-emotional learning.On accountability, the bill builds a measurement architecture into the grants.
HHS must develop guidelines for program data reporting and concrete outcome measures (including metrics such as graduation, employment, and postsecondary enrollment) and requires grantees to submit reports at least by the end of their second and final academic years of funding. The Secretary must ensure equitable geographic distribution of awards, make selected performance data publicly available via CDC, and contract with independent researchers to evaluate selected programs.Funding is modest and structured: the statute authorizes $25 million per year for fiscal years 2025 through 2031.
Grants last five years and are renewable. The bill caps how much grantees may spend on evaluation activities and allows the Secretary to reserve a small portion of annual funds for centralized, independent evaluation work.
Those funding design choices will shape how grantees balance direct services against measurement and reporting requirements.
The Five Things You Need to Know
Grants are five-year awards and may be renewed; awards must be made to partnerships that include a State educational agency and at least one community-based nonprofit.
To qualify, a local area must meet one of specific thresholds for recent violence: either (A) 35 or more homicides per year for at least 2 of the prior 3 years, (B) 20 or more homicides per year plus a homicide rate at least double the national average, (C) state-determined high rates of violent injury or injury recidivism among youth, or (D) a juvenile arrest rate for violent crime at least double the national average, or otherwise demonstrate a unique and compelling need.
Grantees may use no more than 20% of their total grant award for evaluation activities required under the statute.
The Secretary may reserve up to 5% of annual funding for contracting with independent researchers to evaluate selected funded programs, and those independent evaluations must be posted on the CDC website.
Grantees must collect and report outcome data—including high school graduation, employment, and postsecondary enrollment—and disaggregate results by the student subgroups listed in ESEA section 1111(c)(2).
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Renames and reorders existing title V part for the new program
The bill performs housekeeping in title V of the Public Health Service Act: it redesignates the relevant part as Part J and renames Part G as the comprehensive school-based violence prevention program. These are technical changes that slot the new grant authority into the existing statutory structure, which matters for citation and how HHS locates mandate language amid other grant programs.
Grant authority and agency coordination
This subsection creates the core authority: HHS, in consultation with ED, shall award grants to eligible entities to establish or expand comprehensive school-based violence prevention programs. The consultation requirement signals that programming should align with education systems, but HHS retains grant administration responsibility, which places public-health tools and standards at the center of implementation.
Permitted activities and program standards
The statute enumerates allowable uses: direct program implementation for K–12 and younger-at-risk youth, technical assistance, partnership facilitation, and professional development for school staff. It requires that funded strategies be evidence-based, culturally competent, trauma-informed, and linguistically/developmentally inclusive, and it lists concrete intervention types (e.g., trauma healing, social-emotional skill-building, community violence interrupters). That list functions as both guidance and a constraint: applicants should tailor proposals to those approaches to be competitive.
Partnership requirement and local eligibility thresholds
Applicants must be partnerships led by a State educational agency coordinating with one or more local educational agencies in a municipality or local government that meets specific violence thresholds or demonstrates unique need, and must include at least one community-based nonprofit. The statute gives numeric homicide and juvenile arrest thresholds (and an alternative for state-determined violent injury rates), which codifies a targeting mechanism intended to concentrate funds where gun violence exposure is highest.
Mandated measurement, reporting, and independent evaluation
HHS and ED must develop a process for evaluating grant-funded activities: guidelines for data submission, outcome measures (including graduation, employment, and postsecondary enrollment), and a reporting schedule. Grantees submit reports after their second and final academic years; HHS and the Director of the Institute of Education Sciences must report to Congress every three years on program impacts. The bill also requires HHS to contract independent researchers to evaluate selected programs and publish those evaluations on the CDC website.
Authorized appropriation, and evaluation spending caps
The bill authorizes $25 million per year for fiscal years 2025–2031. It caps grantee evaluation spending at no more than 20% of each grant and allows HHS to reserve up to 5% of annual appropriations for centralized independent evaluation. Those explicit funding controls will shape how much money reaches direct services and how much supports measurement and centralized oversight.
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Explore Education in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Youth in high-violence communities: Targeted funding supports programs focused on trauma recovery, social-emotional skills, and connections to mental health and mentors that aim to reduce risk factors for involvement in gun violence.
- Local community-based nonprofits that provide youth services: The statute requires nonprofit partners and channels federal dollars to organizations already embedded in communities, supporting service delivery and capacity building.
- School staff and students in eligible districts: Professional development and expanded access to trauma-informed services mean more school-based supports for teachers, counselors, and students, potentially reducing classroom disruption and unmet mental-health needs.
- Tribal and BIE-funded schools: Explicit inclusion of Bureau of Indian Education schools opens eligibility to tribal education systems that face distinct rates of violence and service gaps.
- Researchers and the federal research architecture: Independent evaluation contracts and public reporting create data and evaluation opportunities for violence-prevention researchers and for the CDC and IES to build evidence about what works.
Who Bears the Cost
- State and local educational agencies: They must join or lead partnership applications, manage grant administration, and coordinate services—requirements that absorb administrative time and local matching or in-kind efforts.
- Community-based nonprofits: While they receive funding, nonprofits will incur administrative, reporting, and capacity-building burdens to meet evidence and evaluation requirements.
- Grantees (programs receiving awards): Up to 20% of each grant may be spent on evaluation, which reduces funds available for direct service delivery and forces trade-offs in budget planning.
- HHS and ED (federal agencies): Agencies must develop guidelines, monitor compliance, coordinate across departments, and manage independent evaluations—tasks that carry administrative costs and require interagency coordination.
- Federal budget/taxpayers: The program is federally funded at $25 million annually, representing a new line item and opportunity cost relative to other prevention or enforcement priorities.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central tension is between targeting limited federal resources to the highest-need communities and imposing rigorous evaluation and reporting requirements: the bill seeks credible, generalizable evidence about what prevents youth gun violence, but building that evidence takes time, money, and administrative capacity—resources that also are needed to deliver direct services now. Deciding whether to prioritize immediate scale of services or long-term, measurable impact is the policy dilemma at this program’s heart.
The bill ties a high degree of accountability to relatively modest funding. With only $25 million per year, competitive awards across the country may be small relative to community needs; requiring partnerships and multi-year evaluation means applicants must already possess administrative and evaluation capacity to compete.
That risks favoring organizations with grant experience rather than grassroots groups with strong local credibility but weak compliance infrastructure. The 20% cap on grantee evaluation spending is a blunt instrument: it prevents endless evaluation line items but may squeeze smaller programs that need capacity-building to collect usable data.
Measurement design raises further implementation questions. The statute requires disaggregation by ESEA subgroups and tracks long-term outcomes such as graduation and employment, but those outcomes take years to materialize and are influenced by many factors beyond a single program.
Attribution will be challenging; small sample sizes in targeted jurisdictions could limit statistical power. Data-sharing expectations implicate student privacy laws (FERPA) and, for tribal schools, sovereign data considerations.
Finally, the geographic-distribution requirement intends equity among regions, but allocating limited funds broadly can reduce concentration of resources where the need is densest, potentially diluting impact in the most violent communities.
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