Since her arrival to San Antonio almost a decade ago, Peggy Eighmy saw an opportunity to ignite change. She set out on a mission to propel foster youth toward a better future through higher education and has since secured millions in funding to support these students.
The Children’s Shelter honored Eighmy as its 2026 Angel of the Shelter during their annual Give a Piece of Your Heart Luncheon. The shelter recognized her commitment to create a network of support for children in the foster care system, or those who have aged out of it, to earn a college degree.
“Every day, the children’s shelter reminds us that behind every statistic is a child, a child who deserves safety, stability, and an opportunity to thrive,” she said as she accepted the award on Thursday.
“That mission resonates so strongly with all of us at UT San Antonio, where we see education not just as a pathway to opportunity, but as a lifeline, especially for young people who have experienced trauma and hardship,” she continued.
Her vision led to the creation of the Bexar County Fostering Educational Success Pilot Project, which they say is the nation’s first publicly funded program seeking to increase college awareness, enrollment and improve college outcomes for students with a history of foster care.
In 2019, the Texas Legislature appropriated $3.5M to pilot the program which to date has served 1,200 youth in foster care and college, including 984 college students and 300 pre-college students. The program has provided more than a million dollars in direct financial assistance to students and provided housing to more than 200 of them.
Local public institutions including Bexar County Children’s Court, and Child Advocates San Antonio, known as CASA, UT San Antonio, Texas A&M University and Alamo Colleges District partnered with the program to provide dedicated staff and wraparound support services to guide students through college.
The program’s Cultivating Learning In Middle School and Behind, known as CLIMB, acts as the pre-college arm of the program focused on awareness and preparedness.
“I’m most proud to say that enrollment of the young people who have been in foster care across UT San Antonio, Texas A&M San Antonio, and the Alamo Colleges has increased by 82%,” she said. “And equally important, retention rates, which really matter in the world of higher education for our population that we serve now mirror the general student first year population.”
An opportunity for impact
Peggy Eighmy’s advocacy work began long before she arrived in San Antonio, but her journey here began when her husband Taylor Eighmy was hired to lead the University of Texas at San Antonio as president in 2017, a role he maintains and has expanded over the years as the university merged with UT Health San Antonio.
“When my husband became president of UTSA, I knew I had a really unique opportunity to use the platform of the President’s Office to work toward improving educational outcomes for foster youth,” she said.
For a long time, Peggy Eighmy had questioned why children in the system and those who were aging out were so dramatically underrepresented in higher education but overrepresented in homeless and incarcerated populations, she said, and why we as a society tolerated this.
“Why should aspirations for young people who have been in foster care be any less than what you hold for your children? [Or what] I held for my own daughter or my immigrant mother held for me?” she said.
Bexar County Associate Judge Charles Montemayor, recalls being summoned to a meeting by Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai along with other foster care stakeholders in the region to meet with the university’s first lady in 2018. They were told she wanted to become involved, and they welcomed the added support and interest.
“We all explained the dire situation of the Texas foster care system and the barbaric situation,” Montemayor said at the luncheon. “The statistics frankly were bleak. In essence, we were taking broken families, we were taking broken children from broken families, putting them in a broken system and expecting great results.”
These statistics told officials that less than 3% of the children in foster care who were aging out were enrolling in higher education. Even with Texas offering these children free college tuition, other barriers were simply too great: stable housing was hard for them to find.
“Peggy set the tone at that point to envision something better,” Montemayor said.
Montemayor said Eighmy saw beyond the issue to focus instead on the necessary actions, including summoning all stakeholders, to respond to the immediate need. She highlighted the duty of public institutions to find a way to better serve their entire community and help them overcome the barriers.
Sen. Jose Menéndez (D-San Antonio) said her pitch quickly resonated with him and other leaders. Unlike other larger Texas metro regions, in Houston or Austin, San Antonio has a higher poverty rate, he said, which raises the barriers to an education even higher for children in the foster care system.
“I think the approach that Peggy brought was innovative,” Menéndez said. “Because the focus was not the institutions — that’s what I loved about it — it was on the kids. The focus was the students.”
Menéndez agreed to help champion this need in the Texas Legislature and in 2019, that vision turned into a $3.5 million special appropriation.
Despite a challenging couple of legislative sessions in Texas since, the program has continued to get funded at the state level through the UT System budget as a UT San Antonio institutional commitment, she said.
“The most powerful thing in the world is education,” said UT San Antonio President Taylor Eighmy. “The purpose and mission of this embodies the core of what universities need to do to support and enable their community.”
This pilot is also intended to inform what can be done at the state level and even nationally to better support students and children who are or were in foster care.
Peggy Eighmy said she is thankful for the recognition and every penny that has been allocated to this work so far. She also hopes the support for the program grows as they continue helping more young people.
“[The goal] is to just never lose sight of these young people and why we do it,” she said. “Because they were thrust into a system with enormous trauma from before they got there in the system. We owe them more as a society and this is this one lane where I have agency where I can try to help correct that in a small way.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
