Project to help educate teachers on homeless and foster students launched at San Jose State

San Jose State University has launched a research project focused on the state’s foster and homeless youth and how to share effective approaches in meeting the needs of these students with teachers and school districts across the state.

The $300,000 grant to San Jose State’s Connie L. Lurie School of Education is part of a $3 million grant the Legislature approved last year to create a CSU Center to Close the Opportunity Gap. Cal State Long Beach is administering the center.

One aim of the project is to create a fresh curriculum on foster youths and youths experiencing homelessness that will be incorporated into CSU credential and certification programs for prospective teachers, school counselors, social workers and administrators. There also will be trainings on best practices for existing teachers and school specialists.

The timing is right. Foster and homeless youths, who already were facing academic and social-emotional challenges, have been disproportionately affected by the Covid pandemic. Yet, their struggles risk going unseen under distance learning. Although unemployment and fear of transmission have likely put more families in housing jeopardy, the number of reported students who lived at least part of the year on the street, in cars, shelters, motels or “doubled up” with other families dropped 6% to 194,709 students in 2019-2020, according to a new report from the California Department of Education.

Leading the project are Brent Duckor, associate professor in teacher education (brent.duckor@sjsu), and Lorri Capizzi, a lecturer in the school of education school and a specialist in foster youth who advises the CSU Guardian Scholars Program for emancipated foster youth (lorri.capizzi@sjsu.edu).