Boarding Program
Boarding Program — A Saint Stanislaus Tradition Since 1854
As an integral part of its mission, Saint Stanislaus maintains a boarding program that offers students opportunities for educational success and personal growth within a disciplined and structured environment.
For more than 160 years, Saint Stanislaus has welcomed resident students from Gulf Coast states and from overseas, providing them with a special form of sanctuary because it became their home away from home. The mix of students from the local area with the boarding students creates a rich cultural diversity on the campus.
An Educational Sanctuary
“It is in community that we realize our mutual responsibility for the formation of one another.”
Brothers of the Sacred Heart, Rule of Life #172
The mission of the boarding program is to be a welcoming place where students work together with the dormitory staff who live with boarding students under its roof, building a safe and healthy student environment. For the good of all, students and your prefects set a high quality of life in the dorm. While the staff strives to meet each student’s needs, teaching students that the overall good of the dormitory as a special sanctuary comes ahead of satisfying one individual’s personal preferences. It takes sacrifice and maturity of everyone to assure the common good.
We strive to make Aurelian Hall, our dormitory, to be a 24-hour, 7 day-a-week sanctuary where boarding students can live free from many harmful influences of today’s society. The dormitory faculty has a mandate to make the dorm a safe and student-friendly place free of drugs and alcohol, free of tobacco, free of disorder, free of dishonesty, free of obscenity, and free of violence.
To help students grow in those freedoms, prefects place great emphasis on developing in each student self-discipline, personal and mutual respect, honesty, and concern for the good of the group. The dormitory faculty will challenge any of behavior that is contrary to those values and they will encourage and reward students when they make efforts to live by them.
We extend a special welcome to our international students. Saint Stanislaus has a long history of welcoming students like you who come to earn a high school diploma and learn English and experience American culture.
Spiritual Development
We encourage students to develop your personal relationship with God, expressed in Christian charity towards others. We teach that faith should be an expression of personal convictions rather than mere mechanical activities; a person’s day-to-day life should be a living witness of these growing convictions. Prefects make every effort to enable boarding students to transfer religious values into action. Since this goal is so important to each young man’s spiritual growth, we require respectful cooperation in worship and in group prayer.
In the dorm and the school, Saint Stanislaus offers a variety of opportunities for prayer and worship: Sunday Eucharist, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, special prayer services, and night prayer.
We do not expect students who profess a non-Catholic or non-Christian religion, to change your faith, but we do ask these students to join in Catholic expressions of faith with respectful attention. We also encourage students of other faiths to find ways to give expression to their particular faith.
Interpersonal Relationships
The boarding faculty strives to nourish the development of each student through an emphasis on developing trusting and respectful relationship with adults and fellow students.
We teach students the importance of building trust by being honest, by following rules as they are created for the overall good of everyone, by asking the necessary permissions, and by accepting the consequences of out-of-bounds behavior. In all situations, the boarding staff takes time to explain why certain behaviors help to build up sanctuary or why they harm it.
Experience has shown that young men benefit greatly from being a part of a boarding program because they learn to be less self-centered through group living and being called to form a culture in the dormitory that nurtures the growth of all through positive behavior and being a positive influence on others.
Academic Excellence
As a Brothers of the Sacred Heart school, we view academic excellence as the development of each student to the maximum of his potential. We recognize that a student’s potential can only be achieved through self-discipline and structure. To this end, the boarding faculty conducts a full program to assist every student at his level of ability. Formal, supervised study periods are structured into the daily schedule of each hall, Monday through Thursday. These study periods are structured distraction-free zones to promote effective, quiet study. During these times students may receive assistance from prefects and from other students if circumstances permit. Students who work to the best of their ability are rewarded with times of more relaxed study or free time. Additional structured study times are provided for students who need additional time to perform to the best of their abilities.
Dormitory faculty members work closely with teachers, guidance counselors, coaches and club moderators to achieve a coordinated effort aimed at student success. Tutoring sessions with teachers or an outside tutor may be arranged for students who need additional assistance. To promote a culture of doing one’s best, student academic success is a constant theme in the daily life of the dorm and is celebrated in a variety of ways.
Getting Involved, Growing Roots
It is a fact of life that the more a person invests in something, the more that person gets out of that activity. Saint Stanislaus encourages our boarding students to get involved with activities outside of the regular school day. Boarding students participate in school athletic teams and clubs as well as the intramural program conducted by the dorm staff. The boarding staff also schedules outings on the weekend as well as a variety of activities on Friday nights, Saturdays, and Sundays.
We also take advantage of our beautiful setting on the Gulf of Mexico. Swimming, boating, fishing, beach volleyball and sailing are popular outside pursuits. The boys can also just relax on the white sands of our beaches directly across the street from the campus.
Resident life offers a unique advantage to the student. Whether he comes from Louisiana or around the world in Vietnam, these students gain a strong focus on their education, better preparedness for college life, and a global perspective that is so important in today’s world.
Our first president, Brother Athanasius, opened the doors in the 1850s to young men to be a part of a unique educational and living experience.
Experience the Saint Stanislaus difference.