GrantED: U.S. Department of Justice - Parents Defending Education

Over $100 Million for Restorative Justice, DEI and Social Emotional Learning

Total DOJ Grant Money Awarded (2021-present): $100,113,942

Total number of DOJ grants (2021-present): 102

Number of States: 36

**Number of K-12 school districts*: 946**

**Number of K-12 students*: 3,235,414**

*These numbers are based on available data and not exact. The number of districts and students is likely much higher. Some awardees, such as Hamilton County (TN), are connected to multiple grants and is therefore only counted once in the numbers.

PDE found that over $100 million in taxpayer money was spent on proposals promoting restorative justice practices, SEL, and DEI in the classroom from 2021 to 2024. This report only captures grants that specifically included restorative practices, SEL, and DEI. The grant total includes both awarded and disbursed dollars.

We chose to categorize the grants into four general buckets:

General: $45,207,178 (47 grants)
- This includes project proposals that broadly mention restorative practices or social emotional learning.
DEI: $32,084,529 (30 grants)
- This includes project proposals that discuss diversity, equity, or inclusion or explicitly explain how the project is intended to improve outcomes for a specific demographic group.
Consulting/Certification: $19,881,347 (22 grants)
- This includes project proposals that aim to hire consultants to educate students or staff on changing school climate. These consultants, however, often promote divisive concepts such as critical race theory, critical gender theory and queer theory.
Hiring: $10,296,100 (11 grants)
- This includes project proposals that describe hiring a new administrator, such as a restorative justice facilitator.

Note that grants could and often did fall into multiple buckets.

Key Takeaways:

Several projects proposed bringing in outside consultants to train staff and students on restorative practices. Outside organizations included CASEL, the International Institute for Restorative Practices, Second Step, and Courageous Conversations About Race.
Many projects had an explicit goal of improving school climate for “disproportionately impacted” groups, singling out LGBTQ+ and BIPOC.
The Minnesota Department of Education received nearly $2 million from the DOJ to “create safe learning environments where practices of anti-racism and anti-oppression are embedded.”
Bowling Green State University (OH) received $1,853,070 to develop student mental health curriculum in rural and high-poverty districts that involved “mindfulness meditation, yoga, and knitting circles.”
A Penn State (PA) project to decrease cyberbullying in Central Pennsylvania K-12 schools was awarded $1,785,773 to “provide an opportunity to meaningfully advance equity in violence prevention for communities historically underserved, marginalized, adversely affected by inequality, and disproportionately impacted by crime, violence, and victimization (People of Color (POC), women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ community).”
A collaborative program between Temple University (PA) and The School District of Philadelphia (among others) hoping to prevent violence by teaching at-risk youth about “community policing, trauma informed conflict emphasizing racial/historical and intergenerational trauma, impacts of social media on conflict and conflict escalation and management, anti-bias education, restorative practices” was granted $1,688,668.
$1,000,000 was granted to Reach Out West End (CA) for a project to improve school safety in Jurupa Valley Unified School District with content “on LGBTQIA+ issues aligned with SB 857, mental/behavioral health, substance use prevention and/or conflict mediation.”
Ocean County (NJ) was granted $1,000,000 to reduce violence in school communities. The proposal equates “teasing” to “oppression, and all forms of violence.”
Milwaukee Public School’s (WI) $986,757 project to “promote racial equity” worked with “Courageous Conversations about Race, Crisis Prevention Institute, Your Move MKE, Marquette University Peace Works, and SKY Schools.”

What is a STOP grant?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) STOP School Violence Program provides grant money to nonprofits, school districts, and city and state governments with projects that “increase school safety by implementing solutions that will improve school climate.”

More often than not, when schools mention “improving school climate,” they mean replacing exclusionary discipline with restorative practices and social emotional learning. Exclusionary discipline removes the disruptor from the classroom, allowing the rest of the class to continue learning. Restorative practices, on the other hand, often disrupts class time for more students, as both the offender(s) and victim(s) in an incident are brought together to discuss what happened and “repair harm.” You can read more about restorative practices and school discipline here.

Social emotional learning (SEL) is more insidious than it may sound. While SEL was originally intended to teach children skills like self-awareness, self-management, and goal setting, the definitional shift to “Transformative SEL” prioritizes equity and “the collective” — it has become another avenue to bring DEI into the classroom. You can read more about SEL here.