Sisters artist is also a teacher for home-school students

Toni Del Guidice works with a student. photo by Jim Mitchell Toni Del Guidice remembers sitting on the beach as a little girl, engrossed in painting with water colors. Now a Sisters resident, she has carried on with an art career that developed into a parallel calling as a teacher.

Del Guidice currently works with home school kids in the Sisters area, finding an outlet for talents she has developed over years of interesting and adventurous art and teaching endeavors.

She started teaching kids when in her early twenties and fell in love with connecting with kids doing art.

In the early 1970s Del Guidice was employed by the Shasta County School District (Northern California) as a member of the Fine Arts Program. Under the supervision of a licensed teacher, "Several of us traveled together in a school bus all over rural California to bring art to smaller communities, some with only one-room schoolhouses."

But she wanted to have her own classroom. So it was on to Chico State to obtain her teaching credential. While there, her professors said, "You need another degree. There are very few jobs for art teachers." So with her art degree behind her, she switched gears, added an English degree, and received her teaching credentials.

After student teaching, her first job was at a boy's ranch near Mendocino. This was a ranch on which boys worked who were a step away from being incarcerated as criminals in the California youth corrections system.

According to Del Guidice, "Teachers lived up there in the boonies in trailers, entering the locked facility to teach."

She said this was a "little challenging. It was not only my first professional experience, but also a potentially dangerous one."

At the ranch she introduced a school newspaper and used art to get the boys motivated to write. Del Guidice said, "The school paper became a big success. Many of the boys proved themselves in other areas and earned points to work on the paper after school."

She worked a lot with that kind of at-risk teenage population. The stress and risks involved in working with this group put her in demand for similar teaching work.

But what she really wanted to do was teach English and Art. Finally, that happened in a Santa Cruz middle school. Then, moving on to San Francisco, she continued with a string of boys' school positions and kept using art as an incentive to learn other skills.

San Francisco's Timothy Murphy School for Boys (high school) presented 15 boys, all "hard-core gangster type kids. All 15 had different IEPs (Individual Education Programs) requiring an individualized learning program for each student on each subject."

During the time she worked with at-risk teens she used art extensively as a tool.

"Somehow tying in art made whatever subject they were doing more understandable, more fun and they would do the assignment," she said.

About three years ago she decided to come to Sisters. She hoped to become a full-time artist here and did not anticipate teaching. And she knew it would not be easy to move right into a teaching position.

But last year she started teaching with the home-schooling program in Sisters, first as a substitute and as a volunteer. This year she is teaching three classes of art. She also teaches creative writing and poetry, and tutors one girl in sewing and embroidery.

Del Guidice is a strong advocate for Arts in Education. She says, "Arts are just as important as math and science. Unfortunately in the 'No Child Left Behind' program the arts are the first to go."

She does a lot of art work outside the classroom. Her passion is "painting large" and she likes to work with bright colors. She has painted eight home murals in this area, including one of Crater Lake, which covers a 30-foot wall of a private indoor swimming pool in Bend. Currently she teaches mosaic at Bend's Arts Central.

Del Guidice was one of four Sisters artists and teachers who taught at the in-service Art in Education Conference held at Sisters High School recently. Her class on integrating art with poetry led to an invitation to work with over 150 Hood River teachers, helping them set up a curriculum that integrates art with their reading programs.

Currently, Del Guidice is working on a grant proposal to publish a book for teachers that offers ways to utilize art to teach and reinforce other academics.

Del Guidice would like to see more of a connection with artists in the Sisters community. She concluded, "It would be great to have a venue more like a co-op run by the artists, where all artists are welcome to display their work, offer workshops, and have lectures and discussions by guest speakers on topics related to the arts."