Parents rolled suitcases into the lobby of the Mastery High School building in Camden, teachers checked passports, and a stack of pizzas from Domino’s appeared. Fourteen-year-old Ryan Olan’s parents fussed over him in the moments before the bus arrived to take him to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

“I feel like he’s going to come back a different child,” his mother, Raquel Olan Robinson, said Tuesday. “He won’t have the same perspective as before.”

That evening, Olan and seven other high school students boarded a plane headed for Ghana, where the teens will spend 10 days learning about their heritage as part of a trip planned through Mastery this year. Six students from Mastery were accompanied by two from a Mastery school in Philadelphia, as well as four adults.