Patricia Campie is a criminologist with more than 20 years of experience leading community-based research, evaluation, and implementation science initiatives. She is the principal investigator for the Research on Lowering Violence in Schools and Communities (ReSOLV) project, a five-year longitudinal study of the root causes of school violence and community, school, and individual capacities to address them. Here she answers some questions about the project.

Schools that are safe create conditions for learning and well-being. Drawing on research and best practices, the California School Safety Toolkit allows any school or district to assess its safety system. Districts and schools can use the toolkit to improve how schools use data, apply best practices in school safety, engage students, promote a healthy school environment and reduce the use of exclusionary discipline and referrals to law enforcement that disproportionately impact students of color.

At 21, many foster youth “age out” of financial benefits and supports from the child welfare system—before they even finish college. Given the challenges they face, it’s not surprising that only 3 to 10 percent of them earn undergraduate degrees compared with 34 percent of young adults who weren’t in foster care. What can states do to ensure foster youth have the support they need to graduate from college? In this blog post, Patricia Campie provides an overview of the educational challenges foster students face in the transition to college.

Eighty-four percent of foster kids say they want to attend college, but only 20 percent will enroll and, at most, 6 percent will earn a bachelor’s degree. What can be done to help foster youths achieve their educational aspirations? In this blog post, Patricia Campie provides an overview of the educational challenges foster students face and highlights a new program that aims to train foster families to build a college-going culture in their homes.

In this second blog post in a series examining educational challenges facing youth in foster care, from early childhood into college, Trish Campie offers some promising solutions to creating pathways to college and career success.

One-third of the 400,000 children in foster care enter the system before age five, just as they should be making the transition from preschool to kindergarten. Seventy-five percent of kids in foster care must change schools, often multiple times, which means they tend to fall behind their classmates, miss more days in school, and experience lower high school graduation rates and less success in college. In this blog post, Patricia Campie offers five research-based ways to bolster school readiness and reduce risks when early entry into foster care disrupts children’s educational opportunities.