Suzanne Gardner built a visual arts program from scratch at Tahoma High.

It began 16 years ago when she took the job after being encouraged to apply by Terry Duty, then the vice principal and currently the principal, and a friend she played soccer with at the time who taught at Tahoma.

“I was the only art teacher,” Gardner said. “And until they hired me, art was just part time.”

Gardner has done something right since arriving in Maple Valley because it was announced on Sept. 15 that she has been named the 2010 Art Educator of the Year by the Washington Art Educators Association.

When she first applied, it had been her grand plan to teach in the Tahoma School District, and with a background in physical education and fine arts it made sense for her to apply for both the P.E. and art teaching positions that were open at the time.

Being an educator is just part of her family make up, it seems, as Gardner’s grandmother taught during World War I while her husband was fighting overseas. Her mother taught and worked as a librarian and her sister is responsible for education for Army families.

After graduating from the University of Oregon, she didn’t go straight into teaching, instead choosing to travel around the world through a job with Pan American airlines. She chose that carrier specifically because it only offered international flights then.

That job lasted two years until she married a man she dated while she was in college who was in the Navy. She re-located to Texas, where he was stationed, then eventually to a small town called Lamore near Fresno, Calif.

“We moved to Lamore and I thought I needed a job… so I started teaching,” she said. I was literally a day ahead of the kids.”

Gardner had taken fine arts classes in college but it was with the intent to be an artist rather than to teach art, so, she relied on the help of a mentor who would teach her how to do things, which she would in turn teach her students shortly thereafter.

When her daughter was getting close to starting school, Gardner said, they decided to get out of California and move back to the Northwest.

For a while, Gardner was out of teaching, working in sales because she discovered when she moved to Washington state that not only would she need to get new certification here but also a master’s degree. She said she couldn’t afford to go back to school and hadn’t been planning on it at the time.

Eventually, though, the call to teach returned with the encouragement of her daughter and some close friends.

In December 1995 she walked over to the University of Washington and went to the education department.

“The head of the education department happened to be moving her office that day, otherwise, she wouldn’t have been there,” Gardner said. “I talked to her and I said, ‘I need to make myself marketable, no one will hire me.’ She set me up with an internship at Issaquah High School.”

While she waited for a position to open up in the Issaquah School District the path to her ultimate goal of working in Tahoma became clear.

“I didn’t have a Plan B, I had Plan A, and it worked,” Gardner said.

And once she started, Gardner realized she would have to build the art classes she would teach from the ground up.

“I started from scratch,” she said. “It kind of freaked me out because I hadn’t had to do that, write all the lesson plans, start from the beginning. But, in a way, it was a gift. We came up with a better plan.”

Parents would stop her in the grocery store and thank her for taking the job.

Students embraced her, as well.

“For the first few years I don’t think I even had a plan period because there were so many kids enrolled,” she said. “I had all this enthusiasm because I hadn’t been teaching since I was 23… which I still have. It’s fun being around kids because you never lose touch with the world.”

For Gardner, art class is a place for students who see it as a non-academic endeavor, who want to enrich their education in a different way.

“It appeals to the kid who is hands-on, kinesthetic visual person who may not be good at math, who may not be good at science,” she said. “They can create and move things around. I try not to make the grade important. It’s the process that’s important.”

She is working with her 3D sculpture students on public art proposals to give them a sense of how art and the real world mix because someday they may be asked to submit just such a proposal as an individual or with a group.

Gardner told her students they could use anything floating around in the classroom that wasn’t going to be used for something else, an opportunity to further a district wide theme of being ecologically minded with an eye toward sustainability, as well as anything laying around the house that might otherwise be tossed out.

Another exercise she likes to do with students is to have them learn to use other senses and to work on a sculpture of a rock without looking at what they’re doing. She’ll give them some instructions, turn off the lights, put some music on and tell them to focus on creating a beach rock out of a lump of clay. It’s an opportunity to develop patience as well as work on the district’s habits of mind. Plus, there’s even a little bit of a science lesson thrown in as Gardner explained to her students the effects of ocean waves on rocks over the years.

“We work on those different skills all the time,” Gardner said.

Now there is a part time and two full time art teachers at Tahoma High.

Her efforts are being recognized, though Gardner said she is humbled by the award from the WAEA, which she will receive at its state conference on Oct. 8.

“I react differently. I didn’t jump up and down. I thought, ‘Well, that’s neat,’” she recalled when she learned she had won.

“I didn’t really tell anybody here at school because Terry had gotten the e-mail, too. Then they announced it over the intercom and the kids say, ‘Oh, that’s neat.’ I’ve been kind of slow at telling people. I’m humbled by this… because I know there are a lot of good art teachers in this state and I just happen to be one.”

Gardner hopes to continue to build and refine the visual arts program at Tahoma High for a long time.

“I came back to it after so long because this is really what I am meant to do,” she said. “I could see doing this forever.”