After more than two decades spent instilling students with a love of movement, Roseville High School dance teacher Patti Baker is ready to take her next step:

Retirement.

The popular instructor will make her final bow later this year at the place where she first introduced dance to area schools as a subject to be taken seriously.

It’s a legacy that includes hundreds of students, dozens of performances and one very lasting monument: the Patti Baker Performing Arts Theater, a 500-seat venue that was dedicated in her honor at the Roseville High School campus in 2005.

“I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of places I’ve always wanted to travel to,” Baker said this week, explaining her decision to leave the school where she began her teaching career. “At the same time, when you’re a dancer, that’s really part of your makeup. So choreography, putting dances together, that’s going to be very hard to give up.”

To say the program started out small would be an understatement. Hired on as an English teacher, Baker, who had danced in college and with small troupes, was soon urged by a P.E. teacher to write a proposal to teach a dance course. Administrators agreed, and guaranteed two years of trial fundraising for two sections of beginning dance.

That was 22 years ago.

“She did change the culture,” said Robert J. Tomasini, who was the district’s superintendent from 1989 to 2000. “When she started out, I can't think of any high school that had dancing going. Not to the extent she did.”

Fast forward, and the RHS program includes beginning and advanced dance as well as choreography; what’s more, each district high school now boasts its own significant dance program.

Perhaps most impressive, Tomasini noted, is that Baker’s program has been as successful with boys as with girls.

“The jocks wouldn't be seen years ago doing anything like that,” Tomasini said. “When she somehow got them in there, it broke the barrier.”

Partly, Baker attributes that to connecting the art of dance to the skill and power of athleticism. But the class’s reputation for relevant, edgy performances, as well as a commitment to fair exposure for all students in the school’s two major yearly performances, also helped attract interest.

“We don’t showcase our best dancers while the others stand in the back,” she said.

From the start, Baker nurtured a no-nonsense approach to her subject. Students in the classes, for instance, aren’t allowed to sit down. “It’s appreciation for dance as an art form and mental and physical discipline that sticks with you the rest of your life,” Baker said.

Baker says the high point of her career came in 1993, when she won Disney’s American Teacher Award. The honor allowed her to take a group of more than 70 students to DisneyWorld, where they performed for a national TV audience.

In 2005, administrators recognized Baker’s contributions – and tireless campaigning for improved facilities – by naming the school’s new performing arts theater after her.

But it was a bittersweet time. Earlier that year, Baker’s husband, Milo Marks, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. He died in June, three months later.

Baker’s students rallied around her. As they had for years with other causes, students performed the first night of that year’s “Holiday Fete” dance show as a benefit for the Brain Tumor Society to support research.

“I think this gives them a sense of honor to do this,” Baker told The Press-Tribune at the time.

All of which means the show’s return next month, the last under Baker after nearly 20 years, carries some special significance.

Slated for Dec. 11-13, the show is the annual showcase for the program’s advanced dance and choreography students, and features about 150 performers.

“It’s my favorite show of the year,” Baker said. “And I am proud to say we have never done ‘Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree.’”

But ticket sales are slow this year, perhaps because of the economy, Baker said. So she’s hoping to get the word out, especially to former students and longtime attendees, that this is one show not to miss.

“Our ending number is Ave Maria by Josh Groban,” she said. “That’s my farewell, because I choreographed that.”

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