Peggy Eighmy, First Lady of UTSA

Peggy serves on the Executive Committee of the  Bexar County Fostering Educational Success Pilot Project. She is a tri-chairperson for Senator Jose Menendez’s Blue-Ribbon Task Force on Child Abuse Prevention and the  Child Welfare/Foster Care Workgroup of the South Texas Trauma-Informed Care Consortium. Peggy’s board and advisory service includes Texas CASA, the  Najim Charitable Foundation, ChildSafe, the UTSA Veteran & Military Affairs Advisory Board, the UTSA Libraries Advisory Council, the  United Way of San Antonio and Bexar County's Ready Children Impact Council, and the  NXT Level Youth Reengagement Center Advisory Council.

Peggy and her husband  Dr. Taylor Eighmy have one daughter, Hannah, a pediatric nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, and are the proudest of grandparents to Maeve Elizabeth.

About the Bexar County Fostering Educational Success Pilot Project

In 2019, Mrs. Eighmy successfully sought funding from the Texas Legislature, the first legislative body in the United States to appropriate public funding to improve educational outcomes for students with a history of foster care. Led by UTSA, The Bexar County Fostering Educational Success Pilot Project (“Pilot Project”) works to improve college enrollment, retention, and graduation rates for students with a history of foster care, and to increase the number of children in foster care who are college aware, expect to attend college, and are emotionally and academically ready to do so.

For the first time, partners across child welfare, the Children’s Court, K-12 school systems, and the two-and-four-year public higher education institutions are working together to increase the number of foster alumni who graduate college.  Recognizing its success, the Pilot Project continues to receive funding from the Texas Legislature ($7M to date.)

The Pilot Project has served 730 foster youth and alumni, including 500 college students with a history of foster care who receive comprehensive services from campus-based support programs established at UTSA, Texas A&M University-San Antonio, and the Alamo College District, and 230 middle and high school students still in foster care who receive pre-college programming, wrap-around services and peer mentoring through the College Bound Docket and the CLIMB Program, a novel pre-college curriculum

"I believe public universities can be catalysts for change and have an important role to play in helping foster alumni reach their highest potential, that universities can best do so, by providing individualized, trauma-informed, and strength-based support on their campuses, and that public universities must engage and work with child welfare agencies, children’s courts, K-12 school systems and non-profits long before these young people reach our campuses. I am so proud that UTSA is doing exactly that."

- P eggy Eighmy, Texas Workforce Commission, Keynote Address, March 5, 2021

The Pilot project is conducting ground-breaking research on the pipeline of educational support for students who have experienced foster care. The scope and the scale of the research is novel and will be critical to understanding how a model of cross-system collaboration may be replicated elsewhere in Texas and across the United States.

Below Image: Peggy Eighmy with UTSA graduate and foster care alumna Caroline Nolen

The Pilot Project addresses housing for foster and homeless youth. In partnership with Child Protective Services, youth still in foster care may live in UTSA dormitories allowing them to enroll in college and develop independent living skills. UTSA is the first university in the country to receive funding ($2.5M through 2024) from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for its “Housing First” program for young people with a history of foster care who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. Housing First provides educational support, market-rate rental assistance for up to 24 months, childcare stipends, and mental health and legal services.  76 young adults and their dependent children have participated in the program, and 27 participants have received their GED or are enrolled in 2- or 4-year colleges.

Updated April 2023