Highest Award : Gardena Art Teacher Gets ‘Bravo’ for Excellence

The day after winning a Bravo Award for excellence in teaching the arts, Gardena High School teacher Phila McDaniel was elated but already looking ahead to other goals.

After more than three decades as a teacher, the award “is a shot in the arm,” McDaniel said. “You go along so far and you feel you’ve given your all. After 33 years, you need something like this.”

McDaniel was one of three teachers who shared the 1988 Bravo Award, given annually by the Music Center for outstanding achievement in arts education. The winners were announced Monday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The award has given her an incentive to apply for grants to help improve Gardena High’s arts program, McDaniel said. She is also planning to write grant proposals seeking money to maintain the school’s extensive private collection of paintings by California artists, accumulated since 1919 from donations by Gardena High alumni.

A veteran teacher and visual artist whose classroom instruction focuses on painting, art history, photography, film and video, McDaniel, 57, was one of two first-place winners who tied in the arts specialist category. A third award was given in the generalist category.

According to Music Center spokeswoman Connie A. Rivera, this was the first time in the award’s seven-year history that three educators shared the prize. Usually, two winners are named, one for incorporating the arts into a traditional classroom and one for achievement as an arts specialist.

The other winners were Taffy Patton, who integrates the arts into her sixth-grade curriculum at Vena Magnet School in Pacoima, and Barrie Becker, who teaches dance at a Juvenile Court school in Los Angeles.

The three winners were chosen from 97 Southland educators nominated by their principals. Ten finalists were announced in December. Each finalist was observed in the classroom by a panel of judges before the winners were chosen. The judges were educators and artists, including a representative from the charitable Jeffery Melamed Memorial Fund, which sponsors the competition.

Each of the Bravo winners received a statuette designed by artist William Crutchfield. The winners also received $500 gift certificates from Robinson’s and audio equipment from Audiotronics for their schools.

‘Like an Oscar’

For McDaniel, who was a Bravo finalist last year, finally getting the award was a high point in a long teaching career that is not over yet, she said.

“It’s like getting an Oscar--the Academy Award for teachers,” McDaniel said.

McDaniel, who lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, was cited by the award committee for her ability to help students realize their artistic potential.

“I sincerely believe that the arts are basic to all educational programs at all levels of schooling and that art is not a frill, but truly the heart of education,” McDaniel wrote to the committee.

She was also lauded for her campaign to create an art museum on the Gardena campus, and for her pioneering research on the folk art of China’s ethnic minorities.

Besides being an art teacher and collector, McDaniel is also a photographer and world traveler who has led 17 tour groups to remote areas of China since the country opened its doors to Western tourists in 1979. She is preparing to lead her 18th tour of China in June.

The Bravo Award was “a huge thrill,” McDaniel said, and it has renewed her dedication to her first love, teaching.

“It’ll keep me going another five or 10 years,” she said.