For Jaida McPhail, 15, this June has sparked her to think in ways that adults don’t always associate with teens in the summer. She’s contemplating morality and the strikingly different perspectives people might bring to it. The questions might involve war and peace, and a variety of “sticky situations” that her teacher introduces.

The class, taught by Caitlin Fitchett, is called “The Demands of Morality.”

“We ask big questions to try to figure out what morality is,” Jaida said. “It’s kind of hard, and it’s interesting to think that way.”

Jaida is among 43 students participating in the Meridian Freedom Project this summer — a number that’s climbed from recent years as the program expands to include older students. This summer the Meridian Freedom Project, in its fourth year, harbors students from grades six through 11. Two years ago, the oldest students were in eighth grade.

Visitors walking through the hallways of the building devoted to the project, near the corner of 14th Avenue and 8th Street, might receive greetings with gusto from young program participants, welcoming them to the center. And strolling through the spaces of Jubilee Mennonite Church, visitors might hear probing conversations borne of college-level courses — an aspect of the program that’s grown since the project first began.

The Meridian Freedom Project opened in June 2014, drawing inspiration from the Sunflower County Freedom Project, which opened in 1998. The projects trace back to Freedom Summer of 1964 and the principles embodied in the Civil Rights Movement. Director Anna Stephenson explained some of the connection between the Freedom Schools of that period and the Meridian Freedom Project.

“The whole principle of democracy inherently hinges on this idea that we have people who have an equal opportunity to an excellent education,” Stephenson said.

Another freedom project has also opened in Rosedale, Stephenson said.

Stephenson taught for four years in the Arkansas Delta, through Teach for America, and through the organization’s alumni network she was placed in contact with people looking to begin the Meridian Freedom Project.

Stephenson noted key partnerships in the community, including The Montgomery Institute, Meridian Community College, the Meridian Public School District and other organizations.

“We’ve had great support from the Meridian Public Schools, and we couldn’t do what we do without their support,” Stephenson said.

Stephenson said students, along with parents and guardians, have shown great desire to be part of the project — which is open to students in the Meridian Public School District. The students, she said, write essays and engage in discussions with staff members during the admission process. The project, she said, supplements what the schools can do.

“We work to support what our educators are doing during the daytime by working with our kids when they’re not at school. We depend on parental support — and our students’ mentors, their pastors…”

Following in the footsteps of the Freedom Schools, the Meridian Freedom Project taps the services of people — undergraduate and graduate students — from various parts of the country to come to Meridian and to work with students. Some are unpaid interns and some receive stipends.

At the high school level, three Ph.D students in Harvard University’s graduate school are working with students. They come through a partnership with Freedom Summer Collegiate, an independent organization, Stephenson said.

And the newly coalesced staff meets before the summer activities begin.

“We do a driving tour of Meridian,” she said, noting visits to slain Civil Rights activist James Chaney’s grave and other historical sites.

At this point in the summer, students are working hard on academic and artistic projects, but other activities are planned for later in the summer, including camping trips to historical sites throughout the region and a week at Mississippi State University in Starkville. Students work with the program all year.

Director of Operations Bilal Browne engages in many discussions with students at the Meridian Freedom Project — from the corridors to the van.

“Even without them saying it, or realizing it, they want agency,” he said. “They want the ability to do what they want in life; they want the ability to go where they want in life. Sometimes there are no precedents for that in their community.”

One of the functions of the Freedom Project, Browne said, is to put students into contact with people who have found a way to exercise that sort of agency.

“They meet chefs, they meet people that garden, they meet people that deliver babies,” he said. And, he noted, they travel — within Meridian and beyond.

For Jaida, classes let her dig into the “big questions,” bantering with students as they grapple with tough conundrums involving morality. But she also works on the nuts and bolts of writing. On a recent morning, before class, she sat with her instructor and worked on an introductory paragraph to an essay.

“We have big discussions in classes,” Jaida said. “A lot of kids have different perspectives, so we’re going back and forth like in a real philosophy class.”

Some of the activities, Jaida said, resemble the things she does in her regular high school classes — such as note-taking and reading. But it’s the interaction, the wrestling with ideas, that especially sticks in Jaida’s mind.

“In these classes we have big discussions and debates and conversations,” she said.

For Fernasiaa Phillips, 15, experience with the Freedom Project has kindled a desire to read — something she said she didn’t have before. She’s in her third year with the project.

“If I want to be a lawyer, I have to read and comprehend what I read,” she said.

So, Fernaisiaa, who will be a sophomore at Meridian High School, went to the public library and checked out some books related to law. That freedom to choose books also left an impression on Fernasiaa.

“You get to pick out books that you’re more interested in,” she said.

Other students, too, talked about the way classes seeped into their everyday lives.

Dewaun Warren, 16, a junior at Meridian High School, explained the way the questions he contemplates in the morality class sometimes linger in his everyday activities. He thought about the philosophical questions that class members ask and answer.

“Say I didn’t help someone,” he said. “Am I responsible for them?”

Dewaun, who will be a junior at Meridian High School next year, said he’s interested in studying architecture or engineering.

“This year has been more interactive,” he said, “with more students talking, more of us communicating.”

Dewaun’s teacher, Caitlin Fitchett, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Harvard, explained the way the sorts of questions Dewaun is taking out of class, and into his life, are precisely the kinds of thoughts philosophy is designed to explore.

“Philosophy’s often portrayed as being a purely academic pursuit that occurs within the context of a university,” said Fitchett, a philosophy Ph.D student at Harvard University who’s also Jaida’s teacher. “I think that’s an entirely false idea of what the point of philosophy is to do. Philosophy can help you challenge everyday beliefs.”

And that notion of challenging everyday beliefs seems to pulse through much of the thinking and reading that the student in the Freedom Project are doing. It’s also what the other college-level teachers are working to accomplish.

“I’d like them to think for themselves and to think independently,” said Christina Shivers, who’s teaching a course called “Interrogating the Spaces of the Civil Rights Movement.” Shivers is a Ph.D. student in architectural theory and history at Harvard University.

The teachers also spark the students to interact with each other, sometimes to illustrate concepts they’re learning in the classes. Marina Watanabe, a Ph.D. student in biological and biomedical science at Harvard, introduces a game of telephone to illustrate the way DNA mutations occur in her class, “Why Haven’t We Cured Cancer Yet?”

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“We think of our DNA as perfectly replicating,” she said. “It should be the exact same. These errors shouldn’t be happening.”

So the students play a game of telephone, dramatizing how words — like DNA — can develop mutations as they travel.

Students who reflected on their experience frequently voiced themes and ideas with a maturity that — at least some of the time — is not associated with children and teens, especially in the summer. It’s a side of the children that the teachers and staff members see every day, both in conversation and in writing. Gianna Biaggi, a Kenyon College graduate and a summer program associate, leads a group of students to create a literary magazine over the summer. The themes that emerge, she explained, run deeply into powerful social issues.

“Some students write about their favorite memories … to poems about disliking authority, what they’d like to do if they were president, racial issues, socioeconomic issues. There’s a wide range of things.”

The intensity and maturity the children bring to these concepts, Biaggi said, are enough to make an adult take a second look.

“They’re writing about them very eloquently, and with such passion,” she said, “that it’s hard to see them as just children.”