NRHEG selected for federal safety grant

The NRHEG school district will be receiving nearly $203,000 through the School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP) offered by the federal Department of Justice. The grant program offered $73 million nationwide for school districts looking to improve safety and security. According to information shared at the Oct. 21 school board meeting, 1,008 schools applied; 203 were awarded funding. NRHEG was one of three districts in the state of Minnesota whose applications met with success.

 

The specified use for the grant award is a project the school has been anticipating for some time: an upgrade to security cameras, entryway technology, and the public address system–all of which are vital elements of safety and emergency response–in both the Ellendale and New Richland buildings. According to district technology coordinator Angie Aaseth, those systems will benefit from an overhaul. “We didn’t know what kind of a chance we had at getting the grant, but knew with a project this big, we needed to try,” she said.

 

“We were pretty excited when we got the news!”

 

An expectation of the grant is that the district will pay 25 percent of the cost to complete the projects applied for.

 

Aaseth worked with district community education director Macy Whiteside to complete the required paperwork: they reported during the board meeting the form was roughly 30 pages long. Whiteside’s assistance was helpful not because the grant applies to community education, but because she has experience applying for grants. The deadline to submit the grant was June 11; awards were announced in October.

 

Whiteside described the application as “pretty intense,” and told school board members, “It really made my day when we learned we had received an award.”

 

Aaseth explained, “ A few of the things that they were looking for were safety measures that we currently have in place as far as personnel, programs, policies and plans. Letters of Support were needed from entities within our communities, [to] which we would like to extend a ‘Thank You’: to the New Richland police department and the City of Ellendale.”

 

Now that the district has received the grant, Aaseth said the next step is assessment and planning. “We are currently in the process of doing a site walk-through with a few companies and will be looking to hopefully start the project this winter,” she said, pointing out the district has up to 36 months to complete the covered upgrades.

 

Since the district has been aware of the need for the project for some time, Aaseth suggests, progress should advance quickly. “We have been pretty much working on this project for over a year. We are anxious to get moving on it,” she said.