Scholar Stories
Ten Summers, One Teacher
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Cradle-2-Graduation StoriesFull Circle
My earliest memory of BASIC was the call telling me I’d been awarded the scholarship.
Tania Fuerte
English Language Arts teacher · Learning Academy, ten summers
Most BASIC stories end at a diploma. This one carries on past it, back to Borrego Springs, and into a summer classroom where the teacher at the front used to be the student receiving the phone call.
Tania Fuerte was a BASIC scholar. She graduated from San Francisco State University, earned a teaching credential at California State University, Long Beach, and became an English Language Arts teacher. That is a complete story on its own, and it is the one the scholarship program was designed to produce.
Then she came back. She has taught in the summer Learning Academy every year it has run, the only educator who has been with it from the beginning. In 2026 that reached ten.
- Imagination Library
- Family Literacy
- TK Academy
- Learning Academy, where she now teaches
- Scholarship, completed
- Graduate, completed
Gold marks the station she came back to, on the other side of the desk.
Every summer it has run
The Learning Academy is a free summer program for second through eighth graders: reading, mathematics, and the confidence to use both. It runs for a few weeks each July, staffed by teachers, and it has now been part of the Borrego Springs summer for a decade.
Each linked year has its own write-up. 2020 is greyed: the summer the program could not run.
Watching students who struggle with reading finally gain fluency and confidence. That’s the greatest reward.Tania Fuerte
What a returning scholar is worth
A scholarship program can measure itself in degrees awarded. The harder measure is whether the people it educated come home, and what they do when they get here. Tania teaches children in the town that paid for her own education, in a program run by the organization that made the call.
In the summer of 2025 one of her Learning Academy students was her own niece.
In her own words
Watching students who struggle with reading finally gain fluency and confidence — that’s the greatest reward. Academic breakthroughs capture BASIC’s mission by creating real progress that gives children belief in themselves and hope for what comes next.
BASIC helped shape the teacher I am today.
Tania Fuerte, Learning Academy
The scholarship was the first move
It paid for a degree, then a credential, and eventually for a decade of Borrego Springs children being taught to read in July.