Dr. Jennifer Blakeslee and Dr. Amy Salazar
Portland State University recently received $945,000 (a sub-award of $3.8 million) from the Institute for Education Sciences (part of the U.S. Department of Education) to test the Better Futures postsecondary education access model for youth in foster care. This program’s goal is to make the transition to higher education less intimidating and more realistic for older teenagers in the foster care system.
For these youth it is significantly more difficult to progress from high school to a postsecondary education. “Sometimes that means you’re moving schools a lot,” said Dr. Jennifer Blakeslee from PSU’s School of Social Work, co-Primary Investigator on Better Futures, “Sometimes it means you have disrupted relationships.”
Blakeslee and her collaborator, Dr. Amy Salazar, are the second generation testing Better Futures, having studied with Dr. Laurie Powers and Dr. Sarah Geenen when they were both students in the Ph.D program in Social Work and Social Research at PSU. Powers and Geenen developed the program nearly 10 years ago, but Blakeslee and Salazar hope this grant will put them in a position to demonstrate on a larger scale that the program is successful, allowing PSU to better disseminate it widely.
The IES grant will cover 100% of the costs of the study that seeks to assess how effective Better Futures is at increasing postsecondary attainment for youth in foster care approximately ages 16–20. Blakeslee explains that these youth fall through the cracks when there isn’t a stable, caring adult in their lives to explain educational opportunities to them. They often need support with identifying their post-secondary goals, applying to post-secondary institutions, and successfully graduating high school. The study isn’t limited to university or community college and includes any kind of formal education (like job training) that happens after high school.
$3.8 million of the grant funding will go to Washington State University Vancouver, where Salazar serves as an Associate Professor in their Department of Human Development. $945,000 of that will come to Portland State, under Blakeslee’s direction. Together, the team will work with university partners and child welfare agencies in 4 states (Oregon, Texas, Illinois, and California) to recruit students for participation in 4 cohorts over 4 academic years.
The Better Futures model is delivered over approximately 10 months, after youth have completed their junior year in high school. It consists of three components: a multi-day summer experience at a university campus, nine months of coaching sessions, and several workshops led by “near peer” mentors.
“Near peer mentors are slightly older, young people who have some experience with both foster care and postsecondary success and challenges,” said Blakeslee. “They can speak. They can be on panels. They can move about the room and answer questions.”
When the Better Futures program started with Powers and Geenen ten years ago, it was through the Pathways Research and Training Center at PSU's Regional Research Institute (RRI). Blakeslee had come to graduate school at PSU to work with young people in foster care, because she previously had the chance to work with other people in the system.
“I fell in love with research as a way to promote new services and programming for this population,” she said.
After graduation she developed relationships with community partners in Portland and felt the best place to continue their work was at RRI. Her focus is now on better understanding the experiences of young people in foster care with services, while discovering how to better support their transition out of the system.
“It’s important to me that Dr. Salazar and I are able to move forward with this project,” said Blakeslee. “Having been exposed to it from the beginning and having received mentoring ourselves from the developers of the program when we were graduate students. It’s just a mirror of what we’re hoping to recreate with Better Futures. We’re both very proud to take forward the work of our predecessors.”
The overall study begins on September 1, 2022. Blakeslee thinks when it’s finished, Better Futures could be useful for supporting other students, because there is a lot of intersectionality with young people in foster care representing other underrepresented groups that have difficulty getting into college.