Public Schools Use Federal Violence Prevention Grants to Accommodate Illegal Immigrants

A multi-million dollar federal program launched to prevent school violence after 17 students and staff were shot dead at a south Florida high school is instead being used to fund special projects to help overwhelmed campuses deal with the onslaught of illegal immigrants. Known as Student Teachers and Officers Preventing (STOP) school violence, the Department of Justice (DOJ) created the safety plan after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland Florida on Feb. 14, 2018. Through its Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) the DOJ dedicates millions of dollars annually to STOP to make schools around the country safer. The goal is “to improve school security by providing students and teachers with the tools they need to recognize, respond quickly to, and prevent acts of violence,” according to the DOJ’s official description, which further states that the grants are disbursed “to improve security within our Nation’s schools and on school grounds through evidence-based programs.”

Instead over a dozen STOP grants worth $13.5 million have been used to fund programs that “explicitly aim to serve foreign students or their families in some way,” according to a report issued recently by a Florida-based nonprofit that runs a vast database of public spending for all to see. The group, Open the Books, lists 15 STOP grants that were wrongfully spent to accommodate illegal immigrants instead of security, but focuses on one in particular because the offender is also in south Florida, not far from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High massacre that inspired Congress to pass the 2018 law that led to the safety program’s creation. It involves a $1 million grant intended to stop violence in the public school district of Monroe County Florida diverted to offset the cost of illegal immigration. “Monroe County has experienced an influx of migrant families with a concurrent increase in juvenile crimes,” the DOJ grant announcement states. “This has overwhelmed local resources such as law enforcement, community mental health, and schools. There has been a steady increase in community crimes, and in the last two years there has been a 119% increase in school arrests. Immigrant youth represent high percentages of offenders, children’s shelter occupants, and students with disciplinary actions.”

The Monroe County grant announcement goes on to explain that immigrants coming into the area have been exposed to high levels of trauma then are met with high cost of living, lack of housing and no community resources. “Youth then have to navigate an educational system that is foreign to them while not having the English skills to do so. This leads to immigrant students having multiple risk factors for juvenile delinquency,” the document states, adding that “it also creates a system where teachers feel ill equipped to meet the educational, behavioral, and mental health needs of our immigrant students, thus leading to low perceptions of school climate.” Therefore, the security grant will be used for a program called Project Wings that will welcome illegal immigrants and nurture their growth and success by providing a four-week trauma informed orientation for students who have “experienced community, gang, and/or familial violence in their home countries, and/or violence during their journey to the United States.” The school climate will also be improved for the illegal aliens with a trauma-informed cultural awareness training for teachers, activities for English language learners and the hiring of two certified teachers/counselors to provide social-emotional English language immersion as well as small group and individual therapy for students and the development of a community-based Spanish and Haitian Creole parent-school liaison program.

The other wrongfully spent STOP grants documented in the report include a $1 million allocation to the Sodus Central School District in New York for an initiative called “Place to Belong” that focuses on an “increasing number of English language learners” in the area. Another million-dollar STOP grant went to seven schools in Oxnard, California with the “highest numbers of suspensions due to incidents of violence with and without injury, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and English language learners.” Miami-Dade Public Schools in south Florida, where one-quarter of the student population does not speak English, also received a $1 million STOP grant that instead was used to accommodate its huge immigrant population. “Meeting the needs of such a richly diverse student body is a challenging task that has become even more difficult post-pandemic,” the district writes to justify redirecting funds that Congress specifically intended to improve campus security.

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