Former students talk about Chautauqua teacher Gail Labinski as a nurturing and amazing mentor whose lessons have carried on long after their school careers have ended. Those she worked with say she was passionate and innovative and had a knack for helping students see their potential.

But after 25 years as a teacher at the island’s elementary school, Labinski taught her final class last Friday and retired. Her longtime colleague and friend Carolyn Buehl, who retired from her job as an art teacher at Chautauqua Elementary School five years ago, held a small celebration Friday and gave a speech in which she referred to Labinski as a phoenix rising from “the bonfires of educational and fiscal cycles.”

“I watched you … reinvent yourself three times: art teacher, reading teacher and

special-ed writing teacher all with 100 percent commitment and enthusiasm,” Buehl said before saying that Labinski is resilient and “a fantastic educator.”

Labinski attributes her long and successful teaching career to a natural talent for organizing activities and instructing others. She said that she can’t remember a time she wasn’t teaching and that, as a child, she would organize the neighborhood gang for games and sports and put on plays.

“Watch your child’s play and you will have insight into who they will become,” she said. “By fourth grade I knew I was going to be an art teacher,” she said. “Teaching for me is more of a calling than a job.”

She went on to teach in many schools from public schools to private schools, schools for typically developing children and schools for atypically developing children. In the 1980s she worked for a time as a Journeyman Stagehand for the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Seattle Opera, but could not stop teaching. She helped establish the first union apprenticeship program offering classes in rigging, lighting and stage craft.

She came to the Vashon Island School District in 1992 and started teaching art. She then became a reading teacher and, recently, became a writing specialist for Chautauqua’s special-education students. Additionally, she started a robotics club, a math club and Chautauqua’s Night of the Notables, in which children research a famous person and are encouraged to emulate that person in a presentation. She taught children in both the Highly Capable and special education programs, working with those who need more challenges and those who need more guidance.

“She went on to teach reading in small groups and was amazing and infused art into that too,” Buehl said. “They got it on so many levels.”

Throughout it all, Labinski said she has become the best teacher she could possibly be.

“There has always been enough flexibility in administration and community support organizations to listen and respond to teachers, to allow innovation and to put forth a whole-hearted effort to find the resources to meet the creative, academic and social emotional needs of the children we serve,” she said.

She thanked her “talented colleagues” for teaching her everything from how to develop programs for teaching children art, highly capable math, writing, robotics, reading and special education; to “how to create with abandon and write from the heart.”

“Janet Baron showed me that anything was possible and Shari Hamlow taught me how to ‘break it down’ so anyone could learn. These women not only influenced my teaching practice, they influenced how I look at the world,” she said.

And Labinski has passed on that mentorship to the next generation of teachers. One of her former students, Theresa Aguilera, said she is getting her teaching certification at the end of the year and Labinski has been her cheerleader throughout the process.

“For the last three years, I have had the joy of working with Gail as my stepson’s reading, writing, and special education teacher. Gail is the same genuine, encouraging and motivating teacher whether you are a student, a parent or a soon to be teacher,” Aguilera said. “As a lifelong learner and artist, Gail Labinski inspires everyone she meets to learn, grow, and create.”

Similarly to Aguilera, Chautauqua para-educator Nancy Smith Wingett said Labinski was her mentor during her first year and was “so creative and is so great with the students.”

“They absolutely adore her,” she said.

Labinski insists the adoration goes both ways.

“I love that I get to work with children. I get to share their infectious enthusiasm. I get to sit and listen when they’re sad or confused and wait for it to pass,” she said.

For her, the secret to teaching lies in trust and while the education profession has evolved with new technologies and new ways to teach and learn, “the bottom line remains the same, it begins with a trusting relationship.”

“Teachers are in the business of transformation. We are change agents, we open doors, we ask the questions that provoke the answers that move our students from here to there,” she said. “Children are transparent. They have pure hearts and the best of intentions. They tell terrible jokes. I will miss them.”