Bravo Awards: An Apple for the Arts Teachers : 10 Area Educators Will Be in the Spotlight Tonight at Pavilion Ceremony

No fanfare. No drum roll. No curtain going up. No glitzy opening.

But every day--at least on school days--the show does go on.

When the curtain goes up tonight for 10 Los Angeles area schoolteachers it will be in a fancier-than-usual setting, the Grand Hall of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The occasion is the Bravo Awards, citing “outstanding achievement in arts education.”

For the two winners announced tonight--and for eight other finalists--there will be no televised acceptance speeches, no paparazzi, no chance for fame and fortune. These are not actresses or producers or starlets--merely the educators of the next generation.

This is an underwritten dinner--still costing $40-a-head, since the Music Center Education Division is not exactly flush--and family and friends, school administrators and some well-known names, like television producer Garry Marshall and actress Nancy Olsen Livingston, will hand out the honors.

And, early Tuesday morning, instead of a fat contract, the honorees will be back facing their toughest audience--their students.

-- -- -- It’s sometimes hard to interest kids in the arts, says one of the nominees, Lynn Hickey, a master teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“We have to really fight to keep our electives alive. This is why I have gone so much to the entire school population. If I can’t have them in class, by George, I will have them where they are.”

Where they are, at Sepulveda Junior High, is in the extensive art gallery that has served as a focal point on this 2,000-student campus since it was set up five years ago. And there are two murals, both completed and in progress, on campus. It’s not necessary to be an artiste to be affected by art.

“Some of us are more gifted than others. Everybody has a creative soul. Everybody gets dressed in the morning and makes an artistic choice--which colors, which textures.”

Hickey says “art is a bridge” in the increasingly multi-ethnic San Fernando Valley.

In the current gallery exhibit, on Korean art, work by students is shown alongside of pieces lent by the Korean Cultural Service. “We pull, from all areas of the school, kids who have something in common--their land of birth, their artistic skills.” For example, at the open house for the new exhibit, the Korean students will dance and Hickey’s art students will wear their Korean masks.

And, just as she does with the Korean exhibit, Hickey will help coordinate five other exhibits during this school year, in addition to working on the second mural.

Her art is only part of her teaching life, since she also has social studies classes. The two disciplines became mixed when the first mural was done last year, showing the “ancestors” of current students, from their various cultures. The faces on the ancestors were the faces of teachers at the school.

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When nominee Janet Garcia was growing up in Atlantic City, N.J., she “always wanted to be a teacher.”

But, after her first year at Glassboro State Teachers College, she came to California and “I had to work and go to school at the same time, so I took 10 years to get my BA degree.”

During that time, Garcia took special classes in fine arts, art and music--all of which come into play in her approach at the Edmondson Elementary School in Norwalk where she has been the principal for four years.

With non-English-speaking students, “the music really opened up the kids . . . they could come to school, be in a totally English environment--except for the Spanish in their classroom--and the music really helped their self-confidence.”

Frequently it’s a double problem, because Spanish-speaking children, Garcia says, are language-deprived in their native tongue. “Learning a second language through singing, music, drama--doing a little play, like Red Riding Hood--is a beautiful way to learn the language. A tremendous vehicle.”

At Edmondson, there is a comprehensive arts program, a panorama of cultural enrichment, highlighted by the annual Cinco de Mayo program. That’s “a beautiful experience,” says Garcia, who, in addition to teaching the dances and songs, designs and sews most of the costumes.

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For 20 years, H. K. Baird has been the drama teacher at Charter Oak and Royal Oak High Schools in Covina.

For his students, drama “is a way to succeed in something,” nominee Baird says. “Kids always want to succeed, particularly high school kids. Drama gives the opportunity for many of them to succeed.”

“When you see what goes into a production, it’s not just one person, it’s everybody--the person who works on the properties and the scenery and who pours the refreshments and hands out the programs.”

Many students, Baird says, “don’t have a lot of exposure to cultural things until they get into high school.” So part of his teaching is organizing field trips to theaters, like a recent outing with 50 students to see “Biloxi Blues.”

But his big emphasis is on the two major productions done each year--a three-act drama in the fall and a major musical in the spring.

“There are so many kids who really don’t have many successes. They don’t have a success at home. They don’t have a success in school. So many times a success like this means they can go on and do things with their lives . . . “

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When her seventh-grade students arrive at Nightingale Junior High, nominee Norma Sporn sees children who have had little training in any of the fine arts.

“First of all, the first entry into junior high is very frightening,” she explains. And, as in anything else, some children are talented and some are not.

“Every semester, no matter the grade level, they are made to draw their face the first day and that lesson is never graded. Then the last day, we redo that lesson and we make a comparison. It is a testing technique for myself and the students--to prove that we learned something,” Sporn says.

She teaches five art classes a day and keeps changing the subject matter. “I do a lot of traveling and I get turned on by different things. If I am turned on by it then the children are turned on by it.,”

In studing Egyptian art, her classes weorked on jewelry, making necklaces out of Popsicle sticks and tongue depressors. “I just never have any problems with materials. I always recycle . . . right now we are in Greece, and using the Styrofoam from packing boxes. We are making sculptures out of them.”

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What did the group of judges look for as they searched through the classrooms of the 67 nominated teachers?

Bob Schlosser, director of audience development for the Mark Taper Forum, said, that a primary thing was the ability to relate the subject to other disciplines. “The most important thing was how comprehensive was the teacher--if she was dealing with one subject, how did that relate to other subjects or to a value system?”

Bravo judge Bill Belamed Jr., representing the Jeffrey Melamed Memorial Fund--which took on the sponsorship of the Bravo Awards this year--said, “I looked for a teacher who was inspiring the students, so that they view arts classes as much more than a way out of studying science.”

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Other teachers who were found to be inspiring their students and who will be among the nominees tonight include:

--Dorothy Lamkin, who raised seven children before becoming a teacher 11 years ago. She is the music and arts teacher for South Gate Community Adult School and conducts two classes in Downey retirement homes.

--Elaine Maria Hoffman, who studied concert piano for 15 years, and later became a bilingual music teacher. During her seven years at the Morningside Elementary School in San Fernando, she has established the Folklorico Dance Group and Drill Team and school chorus.

--Patricia O’Hearn of the Vena Avenue School even brings the arts into the study of current affairs. She had her students write a play about the presidential election process, thus integrating drama and social studies. At her school, which is primarily Latino, “in classes when I have a student with whom there is a language barrier . . . that student may have difficulty in reading the textbook, but he can get involved in an art project. He can paint a volcano. That is one way to learn.”

--Ida Rodick, sixth-grade teacher at the Carthay Center Elementary School for the past 14 years, has skipped lunch a lot of days. That’s because the rehearsals for the annual spring musical are done on her--and the children’s--lunch hour. “This is where they can feel positive, feel good . . . in math, you have to have the right answer. In reading, you have to read well out loud. In writing, you have to put it down, but here, they can feel good about their expressions. They get that reward from the audiences.”

--Bernice Massey, choral music director of Lynwood High School, is trying to take about 60 student performers from the Latino and black student body on a trip to Spain and Africa. “We’re about a third of the way along” in raising the money, she said, for the trip that would include five concerts in 12 days. Her showcase group, she said, is doing not just spirituals and classics, but also “the music of today. One of our tenors is doing ‘Hello’ and he’s not exactly Lionel Richie, but our kids think he is.”

--Darrell Mathews of California High School in Whittier says the skills his students learn go far beyond the play acting he teaches. In English classes, in psychology classes, the drama training will help. “Going out for job interviews--they are used to performing and being on. They don’t feel the tension or the nervousness, so they are way ahead in that.” This year, his students placed first in “group comedy” in the Fall Drama Festival of the Drama Teachers Assn. of Southern California. And, in the High School Theater Festival, now in it’s 14th year, California High School was selected as one of three examples of outstanding high school theater. “I started off, and I was going to be a math teacher. And I am certainly glad I didn’t. There has been so much response from this (nomination to the Bravo Award), I feel like a winner. Compliments from my principal. And even a bouquet of flowers from a parent, with a note that said, ‘You won our bravoes long ago.’ ”