Nathan Boggan’s folks were humble, working class folks who lived in the tiny farming community of Fellowship in Jasper County, on a farm that had been the family’s home for generations.

They were, by nature and experience, cautious and conservative.

But they also valued an education, especially Nathan’s dad, who had planned to be an engineer but had to drop out of college to return home as his dad was dying of cancer. He spent 35 years working at the Lazy Boy furniture factory. His mom was a med tech at the hospital in Meridian.

Nathan, the middle child of three, went to school a few miles down the road from the farm in Enterprise, a small public high school. By his sophomore year, Nathan had established himself as a good student — straight As in all his classes. In fact, by his sophomore year, his teachers struggled to find classes that challenged him.

It was at that point word of a new, different kind of school was opening in Columbus reached the family.

Nathan said he may have heard about it from a school counselor. Or perhaps his parents had read about it in the Meridian Star. He doesn’t recall.

The new school was located on the campus on Mississippi University for Women, a two-year residential high school for juniors and seniors that would be called the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science.

The Boggan family liked what their heard about this experimental school. Still, they weren’t sure.

“There I was in high school, with the only friends I’d ever known, that I had known all my life,” Boggan said. “The question was: is it really pulling myself out of this environment. I have to go to a place where I don’t know anybody for an opportunity that might lead to bigger opportunities down the road. My parents were apprehensive, but open-minded about it.”

It was one of Boggan’s teachers that gave him the push he needed.

“She said, ‘Nathan what do you have to lose? If you don’t like it, you can always come back here. But you’ll never know until you try it.’ For some reason, that was what I needed to hear.”

Saturday afternoon, Nathan joined other MSMS graduates at Huck’s for a luncheon during the school’s annual reunion.

Boggan is a member of the first MSMS graduating class and while much has changed over the years, what hasn’t changed is the profound impact his two years at the school had on his life.

Today, Boggan, 45, is a partner in a Jackson architecture firm. He wonders what his life would have been like had he and his parents not taken a gamble on an unproven experiment in education.

“It changed everything,” he says. “The classes I was able to take — non-Euclidean geometry, logic and game theory, biochemistry — all those course options weren’t even remotely available to me in Enterprise.”

But there was something else, Boggan says, that may have been every bit as important.

“I was a kid from a small rural area,” he says. “I knew other lower middle-class white kids, some African-Americans kids, who were in about the same condition and there was one kid who was half-Korean. That was my whole world. At MSMS, there were kids from every faith, every creed, a wide variety of ethnicities. That experience broadened my perspective in ways that could never have happened back home.”

Boggan has a 15-year-old daughter, who is a 10th grader in a private school in Madison. While Boggan isn’t pressing her to follow his journey to Columbus, he does want to her to see it as an option.

“I’m not pushing it, but at the same time I told her that MSMS has made all the difference in my life,” he says. “Back then, I had no way of knowing that. Now, being older, I understand what a great opportunity it was. It’s still a great opportunity for any academically-motivated kid, no matter their background.”

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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