It’s 9 a.m. on a Monday in late April, and a procession of 20 bleary-eyed eighth graders shuffles into the fluorescent-lit art room at West Marin School. Every corner of Colleen Conley’s classroom is filled with her students’ work—paintings on the walls and pinned to clotheslines, sculptures on tables, mobiles swaying from the ceiling.
At the center of the panoply stands Bruce Mitchell, an Inverness woodworker and sculptor, waiting with a bin of brightly…