When Cheri Hillard was in elementary school, a new girl joined her fifth-grade class. She came in the middle of the academic year, and she was in foster care—something that, Hillard says, made her stand out in the small town of Warriors Mark, Pa. “I remember people picking on her because she didn’t have a mom and dad,” she says. “She was bullied, [so] I stood up for her.”

Years later, when Hillard—by then an education assistant for Penn State’s Child Maltreatment Solutions Network (CMSN)—learned about the proposed launch of a new Penn State program to support students who had grown up in Pennsylvania’s foster care system, she thought of that classmate and wondered what had become of her. Beyond that brief decades-old interaction, the world of foster care was a complete unknown to her. But the more Hillard learned about the child welfare system and about the proposed Guardian Scholars Program’s mission of providing academic, financial, emotional, and material support to foster youth, the more she wanted to help, and the more she understood the program’s importance—to those students, and to the work of the CMSN, a leader in science-based studies informing child welfare policy that’s housed under Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI). 

Tapped as the program’s point person in 2018, Hillard began learning all she could about the workings of the foster care system from Lucy Johnston-Walsh, an associate professor at Penn State Dickinson Law and director of the Children’s Advocacy Clinic and the Center on Children and the Law. Johnston-Walsh ’97 JD Law and her former colleague, the late Gary Shuey, who served as the clinic’s social work supervisor, first approached Penn State president Eric Barron’s office with the idea for the Guardian Scholars Program, the precursor to what would become the Fostering Lions Program. Shuey and Johnston-Walsh had been working in child advocacy for years and knew the difficulties foster youth face, not least in access to higher education. “Their education is often disrupted because they move around so much,” Johnston-Walsh says.

Those disruptions often result in behavioral issues that further impede positive academic outcomes. “Getting these kids to the point where they’re able to get to college is a lot—and then things often mess up because we don’t have the adequate supports in place,” Johnston-Walsh says. “I’ve had clients who got accepted to college but then couldn’t go because they couldn’t pay the deposit, or they didn’t have money for textbooks.”

Armed with data showing how few foster care students enter Penn State and manage to complete an undergraduate degree, Johnston-Walsh convinced university leadership that support for a dedicated program would be a worthwhile investment. In 2018, the CMSN formally launched the Fostering Lions Program, and in 2019, the Pennsylvania legislature passed the Fostering Independence Tuition Waiver Program, requiring all colleges and universities in the state to award students in the foster care system waivers for college application fees and tuition. Penn State played a role in ensuring the waiver’s passage, Johnston-Walsh says, and the university was also ahead of other institutions in that it already had a foster youth support program in place—and a point person for that program: Hillard, who was committed to making sure as many people as possible got to know about the existence of Fostering Lions.

Hillard traveled across Pennsylvania to spread the word. She sought meetings with child and welfare service officers and with high school guidance counselors and met one-on-one with possible college-bound foster youths. “I spoke to anyone who would listen to me,” she says. “I wanted to build relationships and make as many people as possible aware of our program, let them know that there’s a possible higher education available at Penn State for foster youth and there are ways to get that education.” Hillard also advocated for Fostering Lions to support homeless youth. “They need the same assistance, the same guidance, the same services as kids in foster care,” she says. 

In the fall of 2018, she scoured University Park records, identified seven students eligible for the program, and reached out to them personally. She has done the same every year since. To date, Fostering Lions has supported over 200 foster care and homeless youths across Penn State. The program now has a commonwealth-wide presence and, thanks to Hillard’s efforts, a point of contact on every campus. 

Most importantly, 50 students have graduated from the university, a significant accomplishment that has attracted the attention of other universities—last summer the University of Pittsburgh invited Hillard to speak about Fostering Lions. It has also led Penn State to more closely evaluate the program’s success. Last summer, the SSRI received a $650,000 Institutional Challenge Grant from the William T. Grant Foundation to support Fostering Lions’ collaboration with Pennsylvania’s Office of Children, Youth, and Families, with a joint focus on expanding postsecondary access and success for foster care youth. 

The grant, says Carlo Panlilio, an associate professor of education and a co-funded SSRI faculty member, will also allow the CMSN to do a deep dive into the program. “We want to know what’s worked and how to formalize our efforts, package them into specific components so we can understand how each component works, why it’s working—and how the model can be replicated,” he says. “Anecdotally, there’s enough evidence for its effectiveness, but we want to actually quantify that.”

That effort begins with Hillard, whose efforts to expand Fostering Lions have been fundamental to its success. “Having a consistent point of connection is a central part of how Fostering Lions is designed to work,” says Christian Connell, the Ken Young Family Professor for Healthy Children and director of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network. “The program is built around coordinated support and continuity over time, and that includes having staff—like Cheri Hillard and our commonwealth campus points of contact—who help students navigate systems, connect to resources, and stay engaged as they move through college.”

For Hillard, that means connecting students with sources of academic funding—Chafee Education & Training Grants, which award students who have been in foster care up to $5,000 per year toward their college education, and other scholarships they might qualify for—or finding money to help a student pay a bill. She’s helped students get their social security numbers and drivers’ licenses, find places to live, and secure summer jobs and internships. If a student is struggling with a particular class, Hillard makes sure they get the tutoring they need. She sends her students goodie bags and gift cards, birthday messages and holiday greetings. She makes sure they have laundry detergent and soap—for many foster care students, even common necessities can be a financial stretch. Hillard also hosts a monthly “supper and seminar” series to bring Fostering Lions students together, in person for University Park students and via Zoom for those who attend other campuses. “It’s important that they see me and that they meet other students in the program,” she says. “Building this community is important.”

A dedicated staff, backed by the various grants and philanthropic gifts that have supported the program over the years, has allowed Fostering Lions to function with impressive efficacy. The program can extend virtually any kind of support a student might need, from financial support and tutoring services to staff contacts who know the particularities of each campus; and referrals to Penn State’s Counseling and Psychological Services. Each of these elements has contributed to students’ success and played a part in the 50 Fostering Lions graduates who are now out in the world with their Penn State degrees. 

“The program has developed into a coordinated multicampus network of supports through sustained investment and collaboration,” says Connell. “That includes staff like Cheri and our campus points of contact, who focus on building relationships with students and helping them stay connected to resources. Those connections—plus access to financial, academic, and wellness supports—help students stay engaged and progress toward their degrees. We’ve seen that contribute to a growing number of graduates, and the focus now is on continuing to strengthen the model and expand its reach to support more students through completion.”

Now, the goal is to figure out how to get more Fostering Lions students to graduate from Penn State. 

That effort, supported by the recent Institutional Challenge Grant, is focused on strengthening connections across the Penn State system and deepening partnerships with the commonwealth to better support students with foster care experience. “This work brings the university and the state together,” says Connell. “We’re looking at how to strengthen supports not just at Penn State, but across the broader system—so more young people can successfully make the transition to college, training programs, and other postsecondary pathways. There are a lot of different pathways after high school, and our goal is to better understand how the state and universities can work together to support students across those pathways and help them succeed.”

Beyond helping students get to Penn State, the grant is also focused on supporting them through to graduation. “We know that students with foster care experience face higher risks of leaving college before finishing,” says Connell. “What’s encouraging is that we’re seeing a growing number of students persist and graduate through Fostering Lions. The next step is to better understand what’s contributing to that success—so we can strengthen those supports, build on that momentum, and continue improving outcomes in retention, academic performance, and graduation.”

For Panlilio, who has been working with Fostering Lions since its inception, the grant offers an exciting opportunity to dig into that research—research he hopes will ultimately influence policy related to improving postsecondary outcomes for foster care youth. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a family therapist and interacted often with kids in the foster care system. He has firsthand knowledge of the unique challenges facing foster youth and how those challenges can impact their education. 

Part of Panlilio’s research agenda focuses on creating trauma-informed learning environments for students that better support their personal and academic needs. “We’re going to look at all the different units that work with students, from faculty to admissions and all the other services that Fostering Lions offers, to see if there’s a way that we can make those trauma- or adversity-informed,” he says. “Ultimately, our goal is to create within the university a trauma-informed framework to understand and help individual students succeed academically. The reality of the system is that we cannot catch every aspect of maltreatment, we can’t catch all adversity that impacts a foster care student’s educational success. But we want to try and understand the individual person behind the numbers and what are the challenges they’ve faced, to better support them academically while they are at Penn State.”

To that end, knowing who the students are and where they’ve come from, and understanding their definition of academic success, is key to the process—and key to ensuring that more Fostering Lions students can stay the course through their four years of college and graduate with their degrees. Collating the unique experiences of individual students is also important to informing state policy, and to creating a template that can serve as an example for other universities looking to Fostering Lions as a model that they can implement for their foster care students. Hillard’s relationships with those students are integral to this: “Without the kind of relationship building Cheri does, we don’t get to understand these uniquely different experiences that each student undergoes to then understand what they need by way of support,” Panlilio says. 

His team is also relying on direct input from students and young alumni such as Aniyah Gardner, a former Fostering Lions student who is working toward a doctorate in educational psychology at University Park, to finesse the model. Gardner ’24 Lib, who was in foster care until the age of 16 when her aunt became her legal guardian, believes it’s important to weave the lived experiences of youths like herself into the program—which, she says, she found out when she met with Hillard in her sophomore year to discuss the Child Maltreatment and Advocacy Studies minor offered by the CMSN. Gardner says Fostering Lions was supportive in many ways and helped her make some of her closest college friends. And yet, she says, “at the time, I struggled to understand what the program was supposed to provide me. Now that I have graduated and matured, I want to be able to explain it in simple terms to the students—tell them, ‘Hey, I’m working to figure out whether or not we can persist in school, and what are the factors that support our retention rates.’ I see myself as a bridge between research and the students. I want the students to define success, because the truth is that most policies are not being created by the actual individuals they’re impacting. If we can embed our personal experiences into the research, we can create a better program that can then create better policy.”

The insights provided by current and former students on which supports mattered most will help the program improve, Connell says, and also serve as a guide for future students so they have a clearer sense of what supports are available and how others with similar experiences have navigated college successfully. He’s also hoping that the work will expand to include more participatory approaches and broader engagement with system-involved youth across Pennsylvania. “We want to make sure we’re learning not just from students here, but from young people across the state, so we can better understand the supports they need as they make the transition to college and beyond,” he says.

That Fostering Lions has a solid foundation from which to continue growing and improving is important for Johnston-Walsh and for the work that her clinic does. The more the focus shifts toward looking at the “whole child”—where they’re coming from, what they’ve been through, what they need—the better the outcomes, she says, at the university level and beyond.

Progress on the policy side with the passage of state laws like Act 1 of 2022, which supports students experiencing educational instability including foster care and homelessness, is also helping improve outcomes for youth in foster care. Still, even as the system may improve, the reality is that higher education is still largely inaccessible for youth in the foster care system: Johnston-Walsh cites data showing that only 8% to 12% of foster care youth get a two- or four-year degree by their mid-20s. “Getting to college is hard; staying there is also hard,” she says. 

Her Children’s Advocacy Clinic, which is now 20 years old, continues to do its best by its young clients. Through a holistic and interdisciplinary lens, Johnston-Walsh’s law students partner with graduate social work interns, pediatric medical residents, and child psychiatry fellows to represent children’s legal interests in appellate advocacy and in Pennsylvania’s Court of Common Pleas. “As much as you want children’s voices to be heard in court, all the other efforts that happen outside of court, that impact their well-being, their future, and their stability, are equally important,” she says.

For Hillard, it’s the stability that matters the most. Supporting foster care students so that they succeed academically at Penn State, stay the course for four years, and graduate is the primary goal. But to Hillard, helping students find out what success means to them is equally important—because even in the absence of adversity, college may not be for everyone. Her motivation is to be a constant presence for students—whose lives, like that of her elementary school classmate, have been impacted by impermanence—and to know that she has helped them figure out the direction they wish to go.