To shine a light on the transformative power of tuition assistance, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of alumni who were grateful recipients during their Academy years.
By Ted Alcorn ’01
As she neared the end of eighth grade, Ava Dellaira ’02 received an offer she couldn’t refuse.
She’d gone through Albuquerque’s public elementary and middle schools, where she’d had some memorable teachers and made great friends. Her parents were “super smart, creative people,” Ava said, but had not gone to traditional college themselves — her dad had worked as a screenwriter and at other creative pursuits, and her mom had dedicated herself to raising children before working for the city of Albuquerque in environmental health. When they suggested Ava apply to the Academy, which would mean leaving behind that social life, she wasn’t particularly interested.
But her parents were insistent, so Ava agreed to give it a try. “I have a really clear memory of the testing room,” she said, where she recalls writing a long essay. A short time later she was accepted, but the real surprise arrived when the school offered to cover the entire cost of tuition. It was “such an amazing opportunity that I agreed, even if slightly reluctantly, that it would be silly to pass it up.”
Without that financial aid, Ava said she wouldn’t likely have entered the Academy, and the school would have been poorer for it, too. “An integral part of what makes it a really special community is that people from all walks of life are able to attend, and from all different kinds of backgrounds, and from all different means,” Ava said. She wasn’t blind to the wealth of some of her classmates but “I never felt like I didn’t belong.”
Words had always been important to Ava, a bookworm who stayed up past her bedtime reading and processed her own emotions by writing them out. In the classrooms of a string of beloved English teachers, words took on even greater meaning. The combined English/history course Godzilla, long taught by Danny Packer and Stuart Lipkowitz, was particularly revolutionary. “I came to care about history and politics and critical thinking in a way that I hadn’t really learned to do yet, and part of that is because it fully came alive for me through books.”
Twenty years later, Ava has made a career out of words, as an award-winning novelist. She wrote her first book, Love Letters to the Dead, in part as a way of processing the loss of her own mother. Her most recent, titled Exposure, was published this month. “It is about trying to make space for people to empathize with perspectives that might be different from their own, and to try to hold space for more than one truth at the same time,” Ava said. (She gave a talk at Bookworks on Rio Grande on the evening of September 26).
As she raises her own children in Los Angeles, Ava’s found herself seeking out schools that gather students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, as the Academy did. “You realize how rare that is for a school to have the means or ability and to prioritize it.
“Part of any kind of healthy education is having access and relationships and community with a broad range of people,” she said. “You don’t want to just be around people who think like you do.”
