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For several years now Sheila Sandell, a third grade teacher at Taylors Falls Elementary School, has engaged her kids in the  town’s Lighting Festival and made it a memorable 360-degree experience.  This year it will be extra fun to see the faces of her third graders when they catch sight of her leading the Lighting Festival Parade,  in her Royal Lady red velvet robe.  

Sandell was selected as Royal Lady Number 27.  This title is a figurative embrace by the townspeople, throwing kudos towards one woman who has been an ambassador and town promoter and community-builder.

Royal Lady began in 1989 and has continued ever since, honoring one lady as a selfless contributor.

Sandell’s students have been crafting displays as part of the one-room historic Townhouse School exhibit.  

The third graders are welcomed into the festival as equal creative partners.  Sandell has them research the theme of the annual display and read books about whatever the lighting festival is highlighting each year.    They soak up the academic aspects, along with the thrill of being part of something important happening outside the classroom.

Sandell says the students take ownership of their contribution to the town’s holiday party.  They work together to make sure their exhibit is one they can proudly show-off to their moms and dads and the public.

What Sandell recalls of her first foray into the historic school house exhibit is steamboats and students got to take a ride on the paddleboat at Taylors Falls.  “We want it to come to life,” she said of each year’s task.  She has no “favorite” theme that the kids have worked on, but the suitcase year was fun.  That display was all about imagining what people arriving in Taylors Falls, as new residents, would bring with them.

Barb Young, Lighting Festival organizer, said Sandell is “...such a master teacher, and her ability to be a liaison between the community and the school is so valuable.”

This year the Lighting Festival’s collectible ornament is a real preserved in gold-leaf maple leaf.  

Naturally,  trees became the third graders’ display project and their artwork includes display trees in various seasons.  The art is made out of twisted paper grocery sacks.

 Don’s Maple Sugar Shack is going to be open for visits during the festival and the kids will get to see how the maple tree sap is turned into syrup.  Sandell said the students also get to ring the one-room schoolhouse bell Friday night.

Sandell landed in Taylors Falls when her husband, Chisago Lakes High School instructor Mike Sandell,  took a job locally, in 1982.  
Sheila grew up in Finlayson on a Holstein dairy farm,  and worked briefly at a parochial school near Crown, before Taylors Falls.  Mike and Sheila have a grown daughter, Erin Tatiana, who the community embraced years ago when she was adopted from Russia, and came to live with Mike and Sheila.

Teachers reunite with students over lifetimes and Sandell is no exception. She says past students return to the Lighting Festival with kids of their own.  They share stories of their lives and thank Sandell for always telling them,  “I believe in you.”

A wall in her classroom is covered with photos of students who have checked in and said hello.  

There’s a poem Sandell recites by heart-- the “Unity” poem by Cleo Swarat.

It sums up what she gets out of being a teacher and maybe best explains why she is the 2016 Royal Lady of the Village.    It goes...

“I dreamt I stood in a studio and watched two sculptors there.

The clay they used was a young child’s mind and they fashioned it with care....

one was a teacher,  the tools he used were books, music and art.  One a parent with a guiding hand and a gentle loving heart....
when at last their work was done they were proud of what they had wrought. For the things they’d molded into the child could neither be sold nor bought....

and each agreed they would have failed if each had worked alone.  For behind the parent stood the school and behind the teacher, the home.

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