By Alison Reeger Cook

In many ways, Linda Borkat and Sasha Deanna Stovall, who goes by Deanna, couldn’t be more different. But they both have hearts for helping others, and they both have been impacted by Brenau.

Borkat earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing as a nontraditional student in her 40s. Though she graduated in the early 1990s, she continues to stay in touch with and support the university through endeavors such as
ForeverGold.

Meanwhile, Stovall actively furthers the Brenau mission of preparing individuals for a lifetime of intellectual, artistic and academic accomplishment. She teaches kindergarten at Gainesville Elementary School, but she is perhaps best known in town for working as lead of the Real Interactive Summer-learning Experience (RISE) program, which prevents learning loss in children from low-income families with a six-week summer program.

“The goal isn’t for the children to go from the first grade to the second grade, or that kind of grade acceleration,” Stovall, a Gainesville native, says. “If they have just come out of first grade, we want to help them retain the first-grade education they just received.”

Borkat, who was born in Alabama but raised in Atlanta, says she always wanted to be a nurse — though, as a young child, seeing her father admitted for severe illness initially caused her to associate negative feelings with the hospital environment. But when she attended nursing school and was on the health-care provider side of things, Borkat found that she loved it.

She eventually transferred to Brenau after researching its nursing program. Because she had a full-time day job, Borkat attended the weekend and evening program at Brenau’s Norcross campus. She found that the small class sizes helped her retain a wider knowledge base, as she received more one-on-one attention from the faculty than she would at a larger school.

“What really stood out for me was the difference in philosophy between Brenau and the other nursing school I had attended,” Borkat says. “At the other school, I was taught to ‘learn and spit it back out.’

With Brenau, its philosophy is teaching you to think thoroughly, to retain the knowledge long after the class is over, which is what happened when I went there. In the medical profession, you need to think, evaluate, problem-solve and work your way through. I was not being taught that until I came to Brenau.”

Stovall, like Borkat, says Brenau taught her to think in ways she hadn’t before. She credits her Brenau professors, including Camille Ferrari, Karen Henman and Eugene Williams, for helping her learn new approaches to teaching and connecting with young students. Stovall says they emphasized the importance of passion in the classroom and said without that passion, neither the teachers nor students will enjoy learning.

“Brenau brought out some of my best abilities that I didn’t even know I had,” Stovall says. “The teachers are willing to help their students reach their best potential. That’s the reason I am the teacher I am today.” Stovall, who earned her M.Ed. in May, also started at another institution, attending Georgia Gwinnett College for two years before coming back home to attend a local university where she could major in early childhood education. Brenau was her first choice.

“I knew I would have more opportunities at Brenau to be able to do things on campus, such as participating in Greek life as a member of Delta Sigma Theta,” she says.

The early childhood education program was a natural choice for Stovall, who has always been passionate about working with children. At age 15, she started assisting in day camps at Gainesville Park and Recreations and has been doing it ever since. When she learned about the RISE program, which was established in 2012 by Brenau professors and students, she applied and was hired to be a teacher. A month before the camp started, she was offered the position of director.

After Brenau, Borkat went on to get her master’s degree in nursing from Georgia State and worked on the medical floors at Northside Hospital in Atlanta and Baylor Medical Center in Dallas and in psychiatry at Ridgeview Institute in Atlanta. She taught at Clayton State University, tutoring nursing students as a clinical supervisor, and upheld the same philosophy of learning as she discovered at Brenau.

Borkat now lives in Columbus, Georgia, and she remains active in the Brenau family to this day.

“The way I’ve kept in touch with Brenau is that Brenau has wonderfully kept in touch with me,” Borkat says. “Brenau keeps its alumni connected, because Brenau is connected to us.”