Hearing their voices : the lived experiences & sacrifices of African American & Latino males in the boarding school environment

Non-profit organizations like A Better Chance (ABC) have changed the trajectory of the lives of its students and their families. Over 14,000 students over the past fifty years have been granted access to a higher quality of education with greater opportunities to increase their social capital and social networking on their way to quality post-secondary educational tracks. But as the saying goes, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”. The levels of achievement obtained by these students come at a great personal sacrifice. Students choose to leave home as early as age thirteen. They spend the majority of the formative years in environments that are very foreign to them surrounded by people whose assumptions about life are very different from theirs. The partial separation of the students from their home environment along with the partial integration into their boarding school environment could result in their feeling marginalized in both environments (Cookson and Persell, 1991). This study examined the lived experiences of African American and Latino males in the boarding school environment. A phenomenological approach was used to capture the lived experiences of the participants. Questions surrounding race, identity development, social capital, displacement, and resilience were addressed. This study explored how these matters intersect in the study subjects’ lived experiences.