Woodward students capture the school’s vision of collaborative learning in glass.

Like a giant jigsaw puzzle assembled at last, the Woodward Middle School mural reveals an image that wasn’t legible until all the pieces came together.

The process reflects the theme of the piece, an 8-by-3-foot fused glass artwork created by the school’s art students and installed on the school’s south wall last month.

“Everyone’s amazed by the original project, even me,” said Woodward art teacher Darcy Herrett, whose students created the work. “(We saw) all the pieces before they went to Mesolini Glass Studio (to be fused). But when they place them all together, it’s amazing to see how it changes.”

The project has roots in the middle school’s shift, three years ago, from a school serving sixth and seventh graders to seventh and eight grade.

The school’s new principal, Mary Alice O’Neill, wanted a mission statement that would reflect the values of the reconfigured school.

The middle school’s elective Leadership Class took up the challenge of creating a new statement; in 2001-02, with guidance from teacher Scott Orness, students elicited ideas for the statement from both students and staff, and Herrett helped draft the final version.

The resulting mission was an affirmation of both the education and community-building that goes on at Woodward: “We build connections in a creative and challenging learning environment.”

This academic year, the school undertook the challenge of embodying the spirit of the statement in a mural, a $7,000 project underwritten with funds from Bainbridge Island Rotary Club, Woodward’s Parent Teacher Organization and Bainbridge Education Support Team.

For Rotary, funding the art was a way of saying thanks for the school’s hosting the annual Rotary Auction.

“We were very pleased to help with the costs to make and install the mural,” Rotary president Tom Lindsley said. “We are very interested in working with our community youth and helping them where we can.”

Last November and December, Herrett brought in glass artists Gregg Mesmer and Diane Bonciolini, who donated their time and the materials with which the students created their designs.

“When Diane and Greg came into my second period art class and introduced the project,” Herrett said, “what we realized was that, in the process of creating the fused glass mural, we were really living our new mission statement.

“Students all had to connect, because they were each doing tiles, and those tiles had to connect to the next tile, and the next.”

The mural was a challenge for Herrett’s students, most of whom had never worked with the material before.

“It was great to work on it,” eighth-grader Emily Bell said, “although it was a little unexpected because we were a drawing class.”

The finished work has 62 tiles that depict creativity with images of art materials, and symbolize connection with rows of children holding hands and circling the globe. Spelled out in glass thread are such evocative words as “listen,” “safe,” “friends,” “trust” and “thinking.”

The best part, students and staff say, is having the mural on display every school day to remind passersby of the underlying values that teachers and students seek to uphold.

“A lot of time, unless you keep (a project) alive people forget what it is,” Herrett said. “But with our mural, people will be walking past it. They can always see it and they can touch it.

“It’s a beautiful addition to our school.”