NIJ's $5M School Safety Evaluation NOFO Is Not Asking What Works in General. It Wants Proof That Tip Lines and Threat Assessment Teams Work

On October 9, 2026, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) posted its FY 2026 Research and Evaluation on School Safety notice of funding opportunity, O-NIJ-2026-172796. It offers $5,000,000 for an anticipated 4 to 6 awards, with a performance period of up to 60 months and awards expected by January 1, 2027.

There are two deadlines, and missing the first one ends the application:

The Step 2 deadline falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving. If your sponsored programs office closes for the holiday week, your internal deadline is effectively November 20.

The solicitation is short, at 14 pages. It is also much narrower than school safety research solicitations from previous years. This year NIJ is funding evaluations of two specific interventions authorized by the STOP School Violence Act and is not funding general research on school violence.

What NIJ is actually buying

The NOFO limits its scope to K-12 research on the "development, deployment, and operation" of two things:

1. Anonymous reporting systems for threats of school violence, "including mobile telephone applications, hotlines, and internet websites."
2. School threat assessment and intervention teams "that include coordination with law enforcement agencies and school personnel."

These two activities come straight from the statute. The Student, Teachers, and Officers Preventing (STOP) School Violence Act of 2018 created two grant streams. The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) administers the STOP School Violence Program, which pays for training, threat assessment teams and anonymous reporting technology. The COPS Office administers the School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP), which pays for physical security such as locks, lighting, controlled entry and coordination with law enforcement. We covered the most recent SVPP round in our analysis of COPS' $73 million FY 2026 SVPP solicitation.

After eight years of awards under both streams, thousands of districts have tip lines and threat assessment teams. What is missing is rigorous evidence on whether they work. This NOFO is meant to fill that gap. NIJ asks for "rigorous outcome/impact evaluations paired with process/implementation evaluations" of activities supported by STOP SVA and SVPP projects, "or similar programs from other sources that align with STOP SVA's goals."

So the study does not have to involve a federally funded site. A statewide tip line funded by the legislature counts, and so does a district threat assessment protocol paid for out of the general fund. The intervention does have to be one of the two named activities.

Three requirements that eliminate most applications

1. Impact evaluation and process evaluation, both

An implementation study alone will not be responsive, and neither will an outcome study without an implementation component. NIJ wants to learn both whether a program changed outcomes and why it did or did not. Budget and staff for both parts.

2. Cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis are mandatory

The NOFO states that "applicants proposing evaluation research must include cost/benefit and cost effectiveness analyses." Many education researchers have never costed a threat assessment team, which means counting staff hours per case, training, software licenses, referral services and law enforcement time. If your team has no one who has done this, bring in an economist as a subrecipient or consultant. The page limit is generous, and reviewers will notice if the cost analysis is a single paragraph.

3. Letters confirming data access

Applicants "should... include letters of support confirming secondary data access and explain how datasets will be matched." For this topic, the data usually comes from several places:

• Tip line records, including tip volume, category and disposition. These are often held by a state agency or a vendor, not the district.
• Threat assessment case files, held by the district and protected by FERPA.
• Discipline, attendance and incident data from the student information system.
• Law enforcement calls for service and arrests from the police department or sheriff.

A reviewer will ask whether you can actually connect tip records to case files to outcomes. The application needs to show that you have permission and a matching key. NIJ also tells applicants to "describe data limitations, how they will be addressed, and their potential impact on findings." With school violence, the hardest limitation is that the most serious outcomes are rare. A study that measures only completed attacks will have almost no statistical power. Plan to measure intermediate outcomes such as threats identified, interventions delivered, repeat referrals, weapons recovered and school climate, and explain why each one is a reasonable stand-in.

How the application is scored

The proposal narrative may run 30 pages, double-spaced. NIJ publishes the weights:

Methods carry 40% of the score, which is typical for NIJ. The 25% for Potential Impact is higher than usual, and it covers "clear dissemination strategies" and "actionable knowledge to criminal justice practitioners and policymakers." The deliverables section supports that reading: grantees "should devote equal effort" to practitioner-facing dissemination products and to scholarly products. A plan that consists of peer-reviewed journal articles and a conference talk will lose points. Name specific products, such as a district implementation guide, a cost calculator, or a one-page brief for state school safety centers, and explain who will distribute them.

The Statement of the Problem is worth only 5%. Keep it to about two pages and spend the remaining space on design.

Priority considerations and restrictions

NIJ lists five agency funding priorities. Projects that directly support law enforcement operations (including immigration enforcement), combat violent crime, support services to American citizens, protect American children, or support American victims of trafficking and sexual assault "may" receive priority consideration. A school safety evaluation fits "protecting American children" on its face. To claim the priority, complete the Agency Funding Priorities Inventory in JustGrants and state the priority explicitly in the narrative. The NOFO says priority consideration requires that the narrative "state which priority(ies) your project will advance and describe how it will do so."

The solicitation also contains the unallowable-activity language that now appears in every FY 2026 OJP solicitation. Out of scope is any program, at any tier, that violates or hinders federal immigration law, including 8 U.S.C. § 1373, or that "unlawfully favor[s] individuals in any race or protected group." For a school evaluation, the second clause matters most. A design that focuses services on a single demographic subgroup of students, or a sampling plan described in those terms, needs careful wording. Stratifying a sample is legitimate methodology. Delivering an intervention only to one racial group is what the restriction covers. Make that difference clear in the text.

Two other requirements that are easy to miss:

• Gold Standard Science. The application list includes a "Gold Standard Science" component, which reflects OJP's adoption of the May 2025 executive order on scientific integrity. Pre-register your hypotheses, commit to reporting null results, and describe your plan for reproducibility.
• NSPM-33 common forms. The Biographical Sketch and Current and Pending (Other) Support forms are required for every key person. NIJ encourages using SciENcv to prepare them. Missing forms can get an application rejected before review, so collect them from co-investigators now.

Eligibility: districts can apply directly

The list of eligible applicants is broad. It includes state, county, city and tribal governments, independent school districts, public and private universities, public housing authorities, nonprofits with or without 501(c)(3) status, and for-profit organizations including small businesses. No match is required. You may submit more than one application if each proposes a different project, and an entity may be a subrecipient on several applications.

In practice, this lets two kinds of applicants compete:

• University research centers that have an existing data-sharing agreement with a large district or a state school safety center. This is the strongest position.
• Research firms and evaluation nonprofits that already evaluate STOP SVA grantees and can turn that access into an impact design.

A school district could apply as the lead and subcontract the evaluator. That is rarely a good idea, because NIJ will judge Capabilities and Competencies on the research team's record, and a district lead makes the research independence question harder to answer. The more effective arrangement is a university or firm as prime applicant, with the district as a named subrecipient that has a funded data-management role. Paying for a district data analyst, even at 0.25 FTE, is the most reliable way to make sure your data requests get filled in year three.

Design options that fit the scope

With $5 million spread across 4 to 6 awards, a typical award is roughly $850,000 to $1.25 million over up to five years. That budget can support one of the following:

• A staggered-rollout design for a statewide tip line. Many states introduced anonymous reporting apps county by county or district by district. If the rollout dates are documented, a staggered difference-in-differences design is feasible and convincing.
• A fidelity-and-outcome study of a threat assessment model. Compare schools that implement a structured model, such as the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines or a state-mandated protocol, with high fidelity against schools with low fidelity, while controlling for baseline risk. The process evaluation measures fidelity, and the impact evaluation tests whether fidelity predicts outcomes.
• A randomized or quasi-random trial of a component. Examples include follow-up protocols for tips, training intensity for team members, or the timing of law enforcement involvement. Randomizing which schools get the program is difficult politically. Randomizing how an existing program is delivered usually is not.
• A study of tip-to-intervention pipelines. Follow a cohort of tips from submission through triage, assessment, intervention and outcome, and estimate what each step costs. This directly meets the cost-effectiveness requirement.

The NOFO also says to expect that "award clearing takes roughly three months, during which research may be prohibited or significantly constrained." A January 1 start date therefore means data collection may not begin until about April 2027. Build that delay into the timeline, and do not plan baseline data collection for the 2026-27 school year that depends on a January start.

Five-week work plan

This week (by October 31): Check SAM.gov registration. If you need to renew, do it immediately, because the NOFO's last safe date is November 10. Identify your district or state partner and confirm that its research office will issue a letter of support confirming data access before Thanksgiving.

Week of November 2: Draft the logic model and evaluation design. Choose the intermediate outcomes and run a power calculation for each. Recruit or confirm the economist for the cost analysis.

Week of November 9: Draft the Data Management, Sharing, and Archiving Plan. NIJ requires datasets to be archived, and FERPA-protected data needs a de-identification plan before archiving. Request NSPM-33 forms from all key personnel.

Week of November 16: Complete the narrative draft and budget. Submit the SF-424 to Grants.gov by November 20, three days early.

November 23 to 30: Finalize the narrative, attach letters and appendices, complete the Agency Funding Priorities Inventory, and submit in JustGrants by Wednesday, November 25, not the evening of November 30.

Who should apply

The NOFO is a good fit for research teams that already have a district or state partnership involving a tip line or threat assessment program, a plan for linking data, and an economist, or that can confirm all three within two weeks. Teams that would be starting a school partnership from scratch should not expect to build a credible one, with letters confirming data access, before Thanksgiving. They are better off positioning for the FY 2027 cycle.

For teams in a good position, the competition is unusual: only 4 to 6 awards, a narrow scope, and a problem that school safety directors in every state want answered.

Granted tracks open NIJ, BJA and COPS solicitations alongside the rest of the federal portfolio. Search current school safety and criminal justice research funding to see related opportunities, including the NIJ drones, gangs and elder abuse solicitations that close the same week.