Hayes did more than get over her fear. She led other Oakland Beach faculty toward integrating visual and performing art into much of their teaching, helping the school shed its " low-performing" classification under the No Child Left Behind Act, and helping it become a model for other schools exploring arts-centered curriculum. A little more than a decade after she first walked into Oakland Beach, Hayes was chosen as Rhode Island's 2007 Teacher of the Year.

"It's really a community award," Hayes insists. "It never would've happened if my fellow teachers hadn’t stepped up, too. I was able to reach so far beyond my own curriculum because I was always collaborating."

Ironically, Hayes never intended to go into teaching when she was an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, planning instead on a career in graphic design or book illustration. She was "introduced to the potential of education" by Peter Geisser, also a Museum School alumnus, who taught at the Rhode Island School for the Deaf. His school was bursting with group art projects, Hayes says, demonstrating that "teaching art can mean more than just making pretty pictures to hang on the wall." Geisser encouraged Hayes to both rethink her career plans and get a Master's in art education from the Museum School. In time, she did both.

Years later, Hayes got Oakland Beach involved in a pilot program called SmART Schools, which trains classroom teachers to use the arts—and art teachers and visiting artists—to enrich their everyday teaching. For example, when sixth-graders at Oakland Beach studied the human body, they each created a mini-graphic novel in which the villain, a disease of their choosing, tried to take down the superhero—the body itself. Then there’s the upcoming series of fifth-grade workshops with a visiting circus performer; not only will the students learn about the immigration culture of the American circus, they also will study the physics of circus acts and create their own performance demonstrating their scientific findings.

"Students are taking their content knowledge, spinning it into a whole other genre, and developing higher-level thinking skills," Hayes says. "The arts can be a powerful learning tool."

Click here to see the results of Hayes's work as assistant artistic director at the Oakland Beach Carousel Workshop. This community-based volunteer project hand carved a carousel for the restored Oakland Beach waterfront.