The Homemade Scholar

Tucked into the shadows of the White Tank Mountains, on the moiled edge of open desert in the far suburbs of Phoenix, stands a little schoolhouse on the brink of history. Refresh Learning Center, a school with just a few dozen students, was founded in 2023 by a teacher and a pastor in the backyard casita of their home in Waddell. The school is an extension of their church, which they likewise run out of their home. It employs four full-time teachers, two of whom have college degrees and only one of whom has a teaching certificate. The bulk of the students meet in a single aluminum-sided room outfitted with recycled chairs and hand-me-down desks, the walls decorated with student art and a massive facsimile of the nineteenth-century minister Sebastian C. Adams’s Synchronological Chart of human history (birth of the universe: 4004 bc).