did they dive right in to how to make things in Access or did they start with the foundation of normalization and entities/attributes in a relational database? This
I'm not sure how to set it up to keep track of all the check numbers, dates, amounts and designations for the donation
suggests they did not teach those concepts. A template will get you going but won't teach you much about the principles at play.
In fact, knowing M$, they will use things in templates that don't follow those principles - things that you'd be better off avoiding, like multi value fields, table lookup fields and navigation forms - unless you understand the ramifications of those and use them anyway.
The more we hear silence, the more we begin to think about our value in this universe.
Paraphrase of Professor Brian Cox.