The main objectives of the study: 1. To investigate the academic success rate of recent voluntary minorities from Liberia living in Houston, and to examine the reasons why Voluntary Liberian Minorities are being successful or unsuccessful in school. Liberia, which means "land of the free," was founded by freed slaves from the United States in 1820. These freed slaves, called Americo-Liberians, first arrived in Liberia and established a settlement in Christopolis, now Monrovia (named after U.S. President James Monroe) on February 6, 1820. This group of 86 immigrants formed the nucleus of the settler population of what became known as the Republic of Liberia (Wikipedia, retrieved, June 5, 2010). The Liberian civil war began in 1986 and ended in 1996. The war, which was waged by Charles Taylor, a former Samuel Doe ally, saw a lot of Liberians leaving the country as refugees to neighboring Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Ivory Coast (Carl, 1996.). Most of these refugees were later resettled in western countries, particularly the United States of America. The many that settled in the Houston metropolitan area formed the subject of my study.