Pennsylvania's enacted 2026-27 budget provides more than $100 million in school safety and mental health funding for K-12 public schools, plus $20 million for nonpublic schools, municipalities, law enforcement agencies, and approved school security personnel providers. Both streams run through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD). Neither application is open yet. Based on the previous cycle, the public solicitation opens around December 2026 with a late January 2027 deadline, and the nonpublic solicitation opens around February 2027.
Most guides to Pennsylvania school safety grants are built around a deadline that has already passed. This one is current as of the budget signed on July 12, 2026, and the reason to read it now instead of in December is that two prerequisites take longer than the application window allows.
Pennsylvania school safety grant programs at a glance
Both timings come from the last cycle, not from an announcement. Check PCCD's Active Funding Announcements page before planning around them.
Two things that will not wait until December
Register in Egrants. PCCD's Egrants is a different system from the Department of Education's e-grants, and applicants lose days assuming they already have access. If your agency has never applied through Egrants, that registration is its own form. You also need someone holding the E-signature role, because an award cannot be issued until the E-signature has been affixed. You can submit an application before that role is in place, but you cannot get paid, so treat it as a prerequisite anyway. If your agency has no Agency User Manager, establishing one is a separate step ahead of that.
Book your safety and security assessment. This is where applications quietly fail. If you want funding to carry out an assessment, it has to use the criteria adopted by the School Safety and Security Committee (SSSC) and a vendor from the SSSC's school safety and security assessor registry. And if your application rests on assessment findings, the assessment has to already exist. Nobody gets a registry vendor scheduled, on site, and reporting between mid-December and late January. Book it in the fall.
One more rule to brief your integrator on: PCCD is not liable for costs incurred before the official start date of the award.
School Safety and Mental Health Grants: eligibility and allocations
This is the larger program and it is not a competition. Last cycle spread $100 million across roughly 775 eligible school entities, covering physical security enhancements, behavioral health supports, or both.
Eligibility is set by statute at 24 P.S. §13-1314.2-B and covers school districts, area career and technical schools, intermediate units, and charter schools, including regional charter schools and cyber charter schools. You also need to be in good standing with PCCD.
Your allocation is already decided and printed in the appendix to the solicitation, calculated from Average Adjusted Daily Membership. You are not making a case for a share of a pot, you are documenting a compliant use of a number that has your name on it. That should change how you write it: skip the persuasion, get the eligibility and the evidence right.
The Level 1 gate, which decides what you can actually buy
This is the part most coverage leaves out, and it can override your plans for the money.
PCCD's Baseline Criteria sort policies, programs, equipment, and training into three levels, from Level 1 (the most basic physical security and behavioral health elements a school entity should have) up to Level 3 (the most advanced). Under the last solicitation, Level 1 criteria had to be satisfied before a school entity could use these funds for other eligible activities, within each of the physical security and behavioral health sections respectively.
So the order of operations is: pull the Baseline Criteria, work out which Level 1 elements you are missing, and assume the allocation goes there first. A district that walks into December with a Level 3 wish list and Level 1 gaps is going to rewrite its application.
Awards have run as two-year allocations that overlap fiscal years, so you can shape the project around a school year and request a modification later if scope shifts.
On getting paid: programmatic and fiscal reports are both due quarterly, and PCCD reimburses only actual expenditures recorded on a fiscal report. An agency experiencing cash flow problems may submit fiscal reports monthly instead, and PCCD will reimburse on that schedule. That option is not well known and it matters if you are fronting a hardware purchase.
Targeted School Safety Grants: the nonpublic school route
Separate window, separate rules, genuinely competitive. The last round opened on February 2, 2026 with up to $20.7 million available, a maximum budget of $75,000 per applicant, and projects of up to 24 months. Applications closed March 30, 2026. The SSSC approved awards on June 3, 2026: 353 of the 395 eligible applications submitted, totaling $19,356,596.
Note who else is in this pool. Alongside nonpublic schools, municipalities, law enforcement agencies, and approved school security personnel third-party vendors apply here to provide school security personnel services in schools. Eligibility for nonpublic schools traces to the definition in Section 923.3-A of the Public School Code, and classification follows the PA Department of Education designation on its Educational Names and Addresses page. It is on the school to confirm it is an eligible entity.
Two mechanics are worth knowing before you write, both visible in how the last round was actually scored.
Funding is divided by region, and each region's share was determined by the percentage of demand coming out of that region. A strong application from a quiet region competes against less.
Nonpublic schools were reviewed and scored separately from the municipality, law enforcement, and vendor applicants, with that group's dollar allotment determined the same way. You are not competing against a police department's request.
What counts as an eligible expense
The last Targeted announcement listed: costs of training and compensating school security personnel including school police officers, SROs, and school security guards who have completed the required qualification and training; safety and security assessments; mental health supports including counseling, trauma-informed approaches, and suicide prevention; training and professional development on school safety and behavioral health; physical security enhancements including technology and equipment; behavioral threat assessment team training; and other activities necessary to meet Baseline Criteria or address findings from a recently completed assessment.
Two cautions on scope. For nonpublic applicants, anything not included in 24 P.S. §13-1306-B(j)(1-31) may be deemed ineligible, and the SSSC has previously ruled specific items out, including retractable safety batons, tactical restraints, and school safety hotlines. So "physical security enhancements including technology and equipment" is the category most hardware sits under, but check the enumerated list rather than assuming.
Build the application on that last category where you can. An assessment finding is documented, third-party evidence that a specific gap exists, which is far stronger than a general request for better security. It is also the one thing a school that skipped the assessment cannot go back and produce.
One adjacent route, if you are a faith-based school
The 2026-27 budget also carries $10 million through PCCD's Nonprofit Security Grant Fund Program for nonprofit and faith-based organizations to enhance security at their facilities. It is a different program with a different application, but a religious school that misses the Targeted window may still be an eligible nonprofit under that one. Worth checking rather than waiting a year.
Where Coram fits a PCCD funded project
If the project is video or Access Control, Coram runs on the cameras and infrastructure you already have. Under a two-year, reimbursement-based award that matters, because you can finish and report a usable phase without the allocation having to cover a full replacement first.
On privacy posture, face recognition is off by default on new organizations and stays off unless an administrator turns it on. Districts that would rather not run it at all do not have to do anything to keep it that way.
Video Security, Access Control, Guest Management, and Emergency Management sit on one platform, which is worth knowing if your assessment findings span more than one of them, because splitting an allocation across separate vendors puts the integration work and its cost on you. Scope which pieces you actually need before December rather than after the award lands.
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