Sakai library houses a new art education resource center.

To create the new art resource room at Sakai, art educators had to think outside the boxes.

The materials used by volunteers to teach art appreciation in the schools, once crammed into cartons and stored in random corners, have found a permanent home in the Sakai Intermediate School library.

The resource center is the fruit of six years of effort by the schools’ art docents, the public library, individual artists and the Bainbridge Island Arts Education Community Consortium, a private-public partnership of local arts organizations.

The new digs have made it possible to enlarge the collection of materials, says art docent program coordinator Mary Louise Ott.

“It’s wonderful, there was nothing in here when we started,” Ott said. “Now, there’s a lot going on and it’s very exciting.”

Started in 1989 to increase K-8 students’ general understanding of art, the docent program is supported by the parent-teacher organizations and relies on parent volunteers, who go into classrooms once a month to discuss a print each had chosen from the school district’s collection.

Although the art docent program has expanded, over a decade, to encompass hands-on art projects with docents free to use their own materials, wear and tear on the prints and the program’s lack of central organization has challenged each year’s crop of new volunteers, Ott says. At Woodward Middle School, the program has ceased to exist.

Working as a consultant funded through BIAECC, Ott set out to consolidate resources at a single site.

She chose Sakai, she says, for the central location, good parking and a library located near the entrance.

She began the treasure hunt to find art materials stored in various corners of teachers’ rooms and lounges – locating one cache of books on Northwest glass artist Dale Chihuly under a sink.

Cash contributions from the PTOs helped purchase shelving and storage units for the Sakai space. Windows overlooking the room next door were transformed into display boards.

With help from the Sakai library staff, Ott and the docent coordinators – now the steering committee for the centralized program – learned to catalog the materials electronically.

“If I type in ‘Impressionism,’ I get a hit of everything we have: books, games, women artists,” she said. “Or, if you wanted to teach a lesson on color, you could type that in.”

With the old-style docent program, there was no organized check-out system and prints got lost, so Ott set up a library-style check-out using bar codes.

More than 250 hours of volunteer labor later, the room is open – to the public as well as the docents and teachers.

Visitors will find more than 400 prints, posters, books, lesson plans and activities listed in the Sakai electronic catalog.

Materials vary from $100 books from the renowned Harry N. Abrams publishing house to prints “harvested” from calendars.

The range of materials has also broadened, Ott says, to include reproductions of works by women artists like 19th-century painters Emily Carr and Rosa Bonheur, and “Art in a Suitcase,” a quartet of portfolios developed by the public library and Bainbridge Arts and Crafts that represents the art of Japan, Scandinavia, the Philippines and Northwest native people.

High-quality book prints, among them a set of miniatures from India, have been placed in archival plastic sleeves.

“The colors are just gorgeous,” Ott said. “The yellow was the urine of cows that had been fed saffron.”

The collection still needs photographs and books about architecture, Ott says; she also hopes to revive the Woodward program and to see docents’ work in art history and aesthetics further complement the efforts of the district’s art teachers.

The space has infused the docents with new energy, Ott says. Today, the program has 60 docents who serve all the K-6 classrooms. They include visual artists and art historians.

“We have someone who used to work at the Smithsonian and we have an architect,” Ott said. “But even if they don’t know much about art, they’re interested, so they’ll do research.

“I love it when people come in here looking a little lost, saying ‘I’d like to do a lesson plan about line, but I don’t know where to start,’ – and they go out of here happy.”