Student services, including daycare for teen mothers, mental health and after-school programming, have been expanded in the first year of a multi-million grant recently awarded to Richmond Community Schools.

 The Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant is worth $1.45 million and is renewable up to four years.

"The Countywide Partnership for Youth took a look at the demographics of this county and said there are issues here that cause kids from being successful in school: Attendance, fights, emotional behavior, problems so on and so forth," said Pat Heiny, a member of the Richmond Community Schools Board of School Trustees. "The first time we applied to the federal government we did it as a county, but the county's statistics were not dire enough. But Richmond Community Schools, as the federal government recognizes, has issues within the student body that could be benefitted by these services.

"The premise of the grant is, when kids feel safe and when they are healthy, they succeed," she said.

The grant, which serves youth across Richmond and not just RCS' students, specifically gives communities the resources to expand services that target drug, violence and alcohol prevention. For example, one in four Richmond Community Schools' student consumed alcohol within a month, according to a 2008 survey conducted by the Bloomington, Ind.-based Indiana Prevention Resource Center.

"There's a lot of states that don't have that and we're blessed to have that data," said Misty Hollis, RCS' project director of the grant.

RCS has hired an evaluator to analyze data and see if the grant is producing results, which have been established in part due to the IPRC's data, she said.