Colleges embrace ex-foster youths
While she was finishing high school, Claresse Cooper slept on the street.
Cooper spent her whole childhood in foster care. She had temporary placements all over the state and cycled through innumerable schools. At 18, after aging out of the system, she found herself homeless.
Now 19, Cooper is a culinary student at St. Philip’s College, with housing through the Thrive Youth Center. She wants to earn a bachelor’s degree in business or marketing from the University of Texas at San Antonio and own a bakery one day.
Through a new partnership, the first of its kind in the state and possibly in the nation, former foster students such as Cooper will have their own centers at San Antonio’s public colleges and universities for academic and life supports. The benefits can include on-campus housing and meals at the universities.
Representatives from UTSA, Texas A&M University-San Antonio, the Alamo Colleges District, Bexar County and the nonprofit Child Advocates San Antonio signed a memorandum of understanding at a Monday news conference, creating the pilot project with $3.5 million the Legislature allocated this year. A trio of local legislators — Sens. José Menéndez and Pete Flores and Rep. Trey Martinez-Fischer — secured the funding.
“I’m glad that they are doing this,” Cooper said. “They need more people like them in the world.”
The appropriation pays for the centers and their full-time staff, providing physical spaces where former foster students can go to socialize and get help with classes and personal issues that other students can turn to their parents for advice about, said Peggy Eighmy, the wife of UTSA President Taylor Eighmy and one of the project’s leaders. The centers will also help find financial assistance for any number of needs, including books and emergency expenses, she said.
As part of the pilot, all foster students ages 13 and up will be placed on the “college-bound docket,” said Barbara Schafer, ad
ministrator of the Bexar County Children’s Court. They’ll get tutoring, mentoring on college and career paths, their own CASA advocates and help with school-related expenses such as laptops or SAT fees, Schafer said.
State District Judge Peter Sakai, who presides over Children’s Court, said the assumption that foster students can’t handle college only marginalizes them.
“I want to treat these kids like we treat blue-chip athletes and high-performing academics,” Sakai said. “We’re going to go after them and we’re going to retain them and we’re going to get them through the system . ... We’re going to demand of them what we would demand of our own children, and no less.”
Trauma and instability take their toll on foster children, emotionally and educationally. Foster children are more likely to experience early parenthood, homelessness, incarceration or substance abuse, Peggy Eighmy said. Fewer than 3 percent in Texas earn college degrees by age 24.
Nearly 35,000 children are in foster care in Texas, with about 10 percent of them in Bexar County. In the past 18 months, Schafer said, 179 foster children aged out of the system in Bexar County. The Alamo Colleges, UTSA and A&MSan Antonio currently have about 600 students between them who were in foster care as children.
About 400 of those go to one of the five Alamo Colleges, said the district’s chancellor, Mike Flores. The district took a survey and found nearly 60 percent of its former foster students faced housing insecurity and 40 percent faced food insecurity for at least one week during the last academic year.
The state already provides free tuition and fees to college students who went through the foster system. Krizia Franklin, 28, said that will save her more than $100,000 for the two bachelor’s degrees she earned and her current work on her master’s in social work at UTSA. A juvenile probation officer, she plans to attend law school.
Franklin admitted the tuition break isn’t enough for foster children. As they transition into adulthood, they desperately need financial, housing and mental health resources, she said.
“Having the ability to earn an education is a privilege that many foster youth are not entitled to,” Franklin said. “It is one thing to tell somebody that they can do anything they put their mind to. It is another to help them put their mind to it and to help them do it.”