There’s nothing tiny about a project in Smith County in which several at-risk youth recently built and put finishing touches on a 128-square-foot home.
The tiny house was, in fact, their biggest vocational achievement ever, in terms of the time and skills involved.
And that’s not to mention the larger grand plan: to create a virtuous circle in which youth in the H.O.P.E. program at Smith County Juvenile Services learn carpentry and other trade skills while constructing tiny homes that non-profits can use for housing the homeless or disenfranchised.
H.O.P.E. (Helping Others Pursue Excellence) is a residential six to nine month program for justice-involved juveniles, which aims to help them succeed in life, school and future careers. Begun in 2015, it provides academic and vocational classes, family counseling and substance abuse therapy and can house up to 12 youth at a time from Smith and surrounding counties.
David Peters, a vocational instructor with the program, got the idea for building tiny houses about three years ago.
He and the HOPE youth had connected with a nonprofit, Texas Ramp Project, and were helping build ramps for people with disabilities. Peters saw how the youth enjoyed the hands-on work and felt empowered knowing they were serving the community and fulfilling a need for the clients.
Meanwhile,
Peters had started a nonprofit that was planning to build a tiny home community for homeless veterans. He thought this could take interested youth to new levels. He talked with his Smith County Juvenile Services Director Ross Worley about having the youth build the first model tiny home, helping them gain important vocational skills.
“In the course of doing this, we can teach every aspect of construction by building a small house,” said Peters, who came to H.O.P.E. after a career in construction.
This first house, unveiled this month, was built over the past 18 months with the help of many local donations and youth from several successive HOPE classes. It took longer than it might have, from design to completion, Peters said, because of the project’s shoestring budget and some other delays.
Construction also proceeded on a pace set by classroom requirements, he explained. HOPE instructors kept the students on a schedule that aligned their
bookwork with the hands-on work. They youth did the framing, roofing, plumbing and finishing work on the house only after they’d completed related classroom sessions. In this way, instructors could assure the youth earned certain vocational certificates along the way.
In addition to the building trades, HOPE program offers an array of vocational training modules – auto repair, welding, food handling and horticulture – that help the youth toward employment.
Peters says the exposure to the trades gives the young people new perspective and motivation, in addition to hard skills.
“I know of several kids who’ve gone through the H.O.P.E. program I’ve talked to afterwards and they enrolled in vocational classes when they got back into school, and a couple who’ve pursued careers in the trades after getting out,” Peters said.
Often, a youth will mention a parent or relative who does construction work. “Those kids usually strive a little harder to learn as much as they can, and have a mindset that I’m going to get out of here and show dad or my uncle that I know more than went I got in here,” he said.
“You can see that you’ve made an impact.”
The tiny house, now on display in front of the Smith County Juvenile Services building, was built with the help of donations, discounted materials from Lowe’s and in-kind donations from these businesses: All Seasons Window & Door; Carnes Cabinet Construction, LLC; Elliott Electric Supply; and Coburn Supply Co..
Peters said the youth’s next project will be building a pavilion for the juvenile services center.
He’s also hoping to interest Texas non-profits in the housing sector to consider engaging H.O.P.E. to build their needed tiny homes.
While in-person mentoring has been suspended for the past several months of the coronavirus crisis, community volunteer mentors continue their work with TJJD, albeit in socially distanced ways.
They’ve been sending notes and games, even special meals, to the youth at secure facilities and halfway houses and they continue to coordinate remotely with TJJD staff, helping plan for future events.
TJJD welcomes their help at all times and appreciates the special niche mentors fill.
If you’re interested in mentoring youth at TJJD or helping with the community councils that support these young people, you should contact the Community Resource or Volunteer Services coordinators at the TJJD facilities nearest to you. They can tell you how you can help, the training you'll need and how to apply.
Secure Facilities:
Evins Regional Juvenile Facility, Edinburg – Fidel Garcia, Community Resource Coordinator - 959-289-5501
Gainesville State School – Robin Motley, Community Resource Coordinator – 940-665-0701
Giddings State School – Anita Schwartz, Community Resource Coordinator – 979-542-4609
McLennan County State Juvenile Correctional Facility, Mart – Tanya Rosas, Community Resource Coordinator – 254-297-8289
Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex, Brownwood – Stephen Claybrook – 325-641-4240
Halfway Houses and TJJD Parole Offices:
Ayres House and San Antonio Parole Office – Patty Garza, Volunteer Services Coordinator – 210-651-4374
Karyn’s House – Anthony Goulet, Superintendent -- 936-228-0523
McFadden Ranch, Willoughby House, Fort Worth Parole Office – Y. Denise Caldwell, Volunteer Services Coordinator – 817-378-2127
McFadden Ranch – Marketa Johnson, Superintendent – 817-491-9387
Schaeffer House – Willie Brown, Superintendent -- 915-856-9324
Tamayo House – Eduardo Garza, Superintendent - 956-425-6567
By Barbara Kessler, TJJD Communications
At TJJD family days, parents, grandparents, siblings and mentors rush in with a smile and a hug for the young people they’ve come to see.
Families snuggle into groups over plates of barbecue and games of UNO and checkers. They hold hands, whisper secrets, and grin at each other across the table.
But this happy picture can be wrenchingly painful for the handful of TJJD youth who have no family to visit on such special days. For myriad reasons -- family estrangement, addiction, incarceration, dislocation, prohibitive travel costs -- these kids expect no relatives, not even a cousin, to turn up.
That’s where Lynn and Laura Fletcher come in. The Houston couple, parents to four adult children and foster parents to 27 throughout the years, decided in 2012 that they had room in their hearts for even more young people and became a near ubiquitous presence at major events at the Giddings State School.
Laura, a retired teacher, and Lynn, an accountant, were already working with Christian prison ministries for adults when Laura, speaking with a fellow volunteer, learned about the mentoring program at Giddings.
She walked from that conversation directly to Lynn in another room and “told him what we’d be doing,” she recalls with a laugh. They both laugh at that, revealing the infectious good humor that has brightened countless family days and other occasions at the Giddings campus, where in normal times, the Fletchers could be found surrounded by young people, often snuggled in over plates of barbecue and games of UNO.
“They’re very committed and they’re such a light, they just radiate,” said Janet Sheelar, a staff member with the Community Relations office at Giddings.
Lately, with visitation and in-person mentoring suspended during the coronavirus pandemic, the Fletchers, like all TJJD mentors and volunteers, have been keeping in contact with youth via FaceTime chats and by writing letters.
But for the past eight years, the Fletchers drove to Giddings every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon to meet with the youth in their mentoring groups. They were religious, no pun intended, about making that two-hour drive twice a week, with additional 240-mile periodic roundtrip treks to see particular youth at special events, such as graduations, football games and track meets.
“We celebrate everything they do right,” says Laura. “If they get a GED or diploma or they stay in a program, or do a stage change, or make AB honor roll, we celebrate it. Just like we would for our own kids.”
A youth who’s marked an accomplishment may get to choose the food for their next mentor meeting, which the Fletchers would begin with a family style meal. At the least, the Fletchers would bring or send a congratulatory card.
They keep up with the dozen or so kids in their present mentoring circles, and dozens of others who’ve left Giddings for transitional or halfway homes, jobs and college.
Over the years, the number of youth they had mentored just kept growing.
“We stopped counting at 300,” says Lynn, asked for a cumulative tally. Some days, he says, the couple will get a call from as many as four former TJJD youth, just checking in or reporting some news.
The day before we interviewed, the couple had heard from a youth they worked with years before. He was reporting a poignant milestone and wanted the Fletchers to know first: He had made parole.
Everyone wants to be heard
At their mentoring sessions, called “circles,” the Fletchers would meet with a group of six youth in the chapel, where the soaring ceilings and religious motifs set a tone of seriousness. The meetings began with a family style meal and included a short devotion and discussion of a Bible verse. For most of the time, however, the Fletchers and teens just talked. “We do something called ‘Highs and Lows,’ where they talk about the best and worst parts of their week,” Laura says. “It’s how we’ve always talked to our own kids.”
Lynn and Laura also take each youth aside individually, to make sure they have an opportunity to say what’s on their mind.
“They want somebody just to talk to, somebody to listen to them, and I think for many of them, they haven’t had that,” she said. “It could be because of trust.”
The kids, she said, can be precocious and more than one has told her point blank, “I have trust issues.” Laura laughs lightly, again.
It doesn’t happen immediately, she says, but over the course of building their relationship, the boys open up and express a full range of emotions and even “are able to cry in front of us.”
On the flip side, Laura said, some of the youth seem genuinely puzzled by their behavior and motivations. Over the years, she’s heard several utter some variant of, “I wake up in the morning and I’m angry, but I don’t know why.”
But whether they can identify their root issues, all the kids benefit from being heard.
“A lot of these kids look very stoic. They have a wall up,” Laura says. “But that is not the real person. And when they let the wall down, you can see that precious person inside, and everybody wants to be seen.”
Laura Fletcher understands emotional walls. She grew up in Galveston in households disrupted by addiction and experienced abuse and neglect as a child.
“I grew up feeling unloved and unloving and invisible,” she says. She managed to move beyond that unsupportive environment to attend Texas A & M, where Lynn also got his degree.
But some experiences you don’t forget. So when Laura meets kids at Giddings who seem unloving and uncaring, she sees them as young people who haven’t felt loved.
“I think when people are loved they can become loving. Some of these kids who don’t seem loving at the beginning, they are still capable of it.”
The Fletchers are special people and Laura’s past, in particular, gives her unique insight into what many of the youth are feeling, says Anita Schwartz, who as Community Relations Coordinator for Giddings State School oversees the mentoring program.
“It’s almost like a peer-to-peer relationship, and those kind of relationships are very therapeutic,” Schwartz said. The Fletchers, like the many other successful mentors who volunteer at Giddings, understand that the listening is key.
They don’t listen to “make a response” or to “fix it or find a solution,” Schwartz said. “They just listen, and I think she’s really, really good at that.”
Lynn’s childhood was the mirror opposite of Laura’s. He comes from a warm and supportive family background. His special touch with the youth: An unflappable style and irrepressible sense of humor.
He recounts how one young man, an aspiring musician, expressed frank disgust for drawing Lynn as a mentor when he discovered Fletcher could teach him neither the guitar nor the drums.
“Then why did I get you as a mentor?” the youth sputtered at their first meeting.
“‘What instruments do you play?’ is often an opening question, Lynn explains. “I tell them, ‘None!’ he says brightly. And “when they ask me if I can teach them to play the guitar, I tell them I’ll teach them after I learn.”
Invariably, Lynn’s lack of musical skill is soon forgotten as the young men nearly always fall into a close relationship with both Fletchers.
Of course, there are occasional youth who prove difficult to reach, Laura says, and the Fletchers realize they must be discerning when working with the boys. Some have tales to tell and some are inveterate rule benders.
“We hold them accountable,” she said. “We’re not mushy.”
Finding a better path
The vast majority of the young people they’ve worked with, they say, earnestly want to improve.
It may not be apparent at first because they are mistrusting and can be emotional or withdrawn -- their way of protecting themselves, coming, as so many do, from a background of trauma, poverty or family disruptions.
“I would say every single one of the kids we’ve worked with has a trauma background. With some it’s horrific. You wonder how they’re still standing. To watch them learn how to trust somebody and to communicate with their words and not their fists, it’s great to watch,” Laura says.
As parents and foster parents, the Fletchers learned long ago that trust, love and consistency are key to nudging young people toward positive changes.
So they stay committed -- 50,000 miles a year on their Hyundai and thousands of hours mentoring committed.
This is their purpose and “God calls us to do it,” Lynn says.
Staying consistent is why, in addition to the fun events, the Fletchers also turn up at court hearings, ARD (special education) meetings and other interventions, and sometimes write letters to judges and parole panels. These less visible appearances are their way of doing every last thing they can to support a youth they’re mentoring and signaling they’ll always be there.
Sometimes, the child they’re rooting for will succeed brilliantly. They mention one youth who is in college, living independently, with a good future ahead; another just recently got a job in a warehouse and has a supportive girlfriend.
One youth they keep up with is a “smart and charming” young man who participates in a 12-step program. He’s working to beat the addiction that claimed many close family members. When he was at his family home “he’d call and say, ‘I can’t stay here, everybody’s using’,” Laura said.
He “slipped” for a while, but “he got back up,” she says, and while this period of social distancing has been difficult, he is keeping afloat. Fingers crossed.
Success at Giddings is not always measured as one might in more privileged places: It could mean that a youth advanced one stage on the behavioral ladder or completed a vocational-technical certificate. But these achievements loom large, because they represent a turn away from the destructive path they’d been on.
Sometimes, along with the nurturing, the young people they’ve mentored need reality checks.
One hurdle the Fletchers regularly confront is that the young men, having had contact with gangs or family and friends who’ve gone to prison, have a mythologized image of incarceration.
They stress to these youth that Giddings is “summer camp” by comparison and presents them a chance to avoid going to an adult prison, either for their current sentenced offense or for later charges if they persist on the wrong path.
But 17-year-olds can be hard-headed. Laura tells about one youth who broke their hearts when he stumbled after leaving Giddings.
She remembers embracing this strapping teenager as he departed the campus some four years ago. “I gave him a hug, and he said, ‘That’s the first hug I’ve ever had’.
He tried, but failed, to stay out of trouble and ended up in prison. They stay in touch and he repeatedly tells the Fletchers to warn the kids still at Giddings to get their lives in order while they’re there.
“He tells me all the time,” Laura says, a hitch in her voice. “ ‘Tell the boys, I waited too long to change, don’t wait too long to change’.”
Looking back at their Giddings experience, the young men often tell Laura and Lynn how they were helped by the schooling and encouragement they received at Giddings.
But more than any single event or achievement, it’s the relationships they made that seem to have left the biggest imprint.
Laura and Lynn have gleaned this from their interactions with current and former TJJD youth.
“Of all the youth we’ve worked with, only one ever asked us for money,” Laura said. This illustrates to her that for all their big talk about buying expensive things and finding lucrative jobs, what the young men really crave is human connection, and when they find that, they cherish it.
Just last week, the Fletchers received a letter from a youth who’d joined their mentoring group shortly before in-person meetings were suspended. He’d seemed disengaged and they worried at the time that maybe he just didn’t care.
But his letter was long and effusive. He was making progress in his therapy program. He had plans to progress on his “stages.” And he wanted to know how they were doing.
“I Know you guys are probably bored,” he wrote. (You can feel Laura grinning at that.) “I hope you are staying inside and no one in your family is sick,” he added. More details about campus events, and then he closed:
“Thank you for taking me into your heart and accepting me as your child.”
(If you are interested in becoming a TJJD mentor, please see the story "How to become a mentor" published here on our website.)
Christi Mallette retired quietly last month after nearly 45 years at TJJD, though her colleagues -- all social-distancing and mainly working from home -- turned her exit into a noisier affair with a COVID-appropriate, no-contact honking and yelling drive-by salute at Central Office last Friday.
It was a rousing yet touching good-bye for the unflappable Mallette, Administrator of Non-Residential Programs for Monitoring and Inspections, who’s witnessed many changes over decades of service at TJJD/TYC/Texas Youth Council.
She began her career in October 1975 when the agency was still called the Texas Youth Council and entering a major overhaul.
A federal court had just ruled in the civil rights case Morales v. Turman that incarcerated youth were entitled to due process, fair and appropriate discipline and regular access to medical care and education. This landmark decision originating in Texas would prompt increased standardization and benchmarks for the treatment of juveniles across the country.
Mallette and several other young people just starting their careers were recruited to work at a therapeutic wellness camp set up near the Crockett State School. “It was not a well-known program at the time, and they needed experienced people,” said Mallette, who has a degree in sociology from UT-Arlington and a master’s in criminal justice from Sam Houston University. She had previously worked with a youth program for girls in Dallas.
The Crockett camp housed 80 boys. “We built our own structures and cooked our own meals and basically lived in the woods,” Mallette said. This new approach, helping youth develop self-sufficiency skills and accountability was exciting and cutting edge, she said. Mallette also worked with programs at Crockett for "Children in Need of Supervision," which were later moved out of TYC purview.
She moved on to become director of a similar camp near Fairfield that was completely built as a free-standing facility on leased TYC land. It had its own kitchen, medical and maintenance facilities and served younger boys who'd been adjudicated. By 1983, however, Mallette was “ready to get out of the wilderness” and happy to join the central office in Austin as a management auditor.
About the same time, the Texas Legislature gave the agency a new name, the Texas Youth Commission. Reforms continued to roll out.
Mallette oversaw several special projects over the next several years, involving community service programs, special investigations and halfway houses, which were opening at locations across the state.
“We started saying it was best to serve kids more locally,” she said, a perennial goal.
In 1997, in recognition of her wide experience, TYC leadership asked Mallette to apply to become Administrator of Parole, a job she held until 2008. Along with starting the camp at Crockett, her service in parole would be among her proudest moments.
At the time, the agency still served youth up to age 21 and the juvenile detention and corollary parole populations each numbered a few thousand.
Tasked with developing a plan for paroled youth that went beyond basic check-ins with parole officers, Mallette brought in people from parole, education, medical, psychology, auditing, IT and other departments to design the program. She also set up teams to implement and oversee it. They held open meetings at facilities across the state to gather input and developed a program for youth that helped with resocialization and meeting concrete goals.
“We felt that it was successful. To this very day I have people who’ve come up and say the best part of their career was working on the parole design or other team,” Mallette said. “It produced a parole program with accountability and structure. The officers really seemed to grab onto it to work with the youth, to measure their successes.”
One member of that re-design team, TJJD’s current Director of Re-Entry and Parole Services Todd Novak remembers Mallette as “very forward-thinking in leading the complete redesign of parole operations.”
Many of her ideas are still in practice today, Novak said, and that’s a testament to her detailed, thoughtful work.
“Christi was a true juvenile justice pioneer with a diverse experience that she drew on to be a leader, mentor and confidant to so many people,” he said. “She was always open to staff input, new ideas, and valued input from the field.”
Said Mallette, “I loved working with parole. I think it had been overlooked for years. But, you have to begin with the end in mind, the time when people get (back) in the community.”
Mallette next served as acting director of a section that encompassed inspection, quality assurance and maintenance monitoring -- and lived through another overhaul in 2007 and name change for the agency, to TJJD in 2011.
Later, after all those functions she oversaw were wrapped into one new department, Mallette, having done so much over 35 years, considered retiring. But the director of the newly consolidated Department of Monitoring and Inspections, Terri Dollar, persuaded her to stay and continue sharing her depth of knowledge.
“Christi is just a remarkable person with the most amazing stories,” Dollar said. “Over her tenure, I absolutely believe that she has made our agency, our staff and the care of our youth, better. I personally have been blessed and significantly impacted by her wisdom and her experience.”
“I chose to stay on,” Mallette mused. “Little did I know that 8 or 9 years later I would still be there!” She finally decided to take retirement this summer as the COVID crisis ground on with no resolution in sight. It seemed like the right time to transition.
She will miss working with Dollar and with her TJJD colleagues, Mallette said, but has no shortage of recreational work waiting for her outside of the office.
She plans to continue renovations on her 100-year-old home in the Hyde Park historic district in Austin. Later, when the pandemic subsides, she may find volunteer work helping rescue animals, a lifelong passion, or return to offering instruction to young people in archery, a sport she has taught as a community volunteer for 30 years.
By Barbara Kessler, TJJD Communications
Tamayo House staffers Israel Saenz and Gerardo Penuelas both discovered guitars as kids and found joy making music.
Today they reach back to those early experiences when they were immersed in teen bands or plucking away in self-soothing solitude as they teach the young men at Tamayo how to pick, strum and otherwise rock out in their own way.
For Saenz, who came of age in the 1980s and loves roots and rock and the blues, everything from Robert Johnson to Stevie Ray Vaughan, his guitar was his trusted boyhood companion.
“I tell these boys that when I was growing up, my guitar never let me down, whether I was sad or not. I could always express my feelings with it.”
As a left-hander from a household where money was tight, Saenz had to restring the acoustic guitar his mother found for him at a rummage sale. Paid lessons were out of the question. But he found inspiration in the music and life story of the great Jimi Hendrix, a fellow leftie and self-taught guitarist, who not only mastered the instrument, but shook up the world with his reverberations.
Back in the ‘80s, long before YouTube instructional videos, Saenz listened to local musicians at restaurants and Quinceañeras. He picked the players brains, if not also their instruments. Then he returned home to dwell in the peace of working out tunes on his broken guitar that bullies teased him about.
By age 15, he played by ear so well that “of course I was in a band,” Saenz says with a knowing chuckle. Who wasn’t in a band at 15!
His ensemble played the cover songs everyone wanted to hear. And Saenz greatly enjoyed entertaining people. But he later broke away to create his own music.
“I love to write music. A lot of people like to play cover songs, but to me, someone already did that.”
At the age of 11, Penuelas was also searching for a way to take the music lessons he couldn’t afford. He found the solution at his Catholic church, where he picked up both the guitar and the art of barter and trade.
He asked the church elders if he could receive guitar lessons. He could, replied the priest, though he drove a hard bargain: Penuelas could get lessons in exchange for playing at masses.
“I ended up playing at the 9 and the 12 -- and the 5 on Sundays -- and the 5 on Saturday,” Penuelas recalls. He played four masses each weekend, for many weekends, adding up to many masses -- and he became a young master guitarist.
By 13, Penuelas was himself instructing a passel of younger kids at the church. He was allowed to use a classroom for the lessons -- $1.50 a pop per student – as long as he kept playing guitar, that’s right, at mass.
Soon, he was also teaching adults at the church and this time devising the deal. He gave guitar lessons in exchange for piano lessons for himself.
He joined a teen band, expanded into vocals, and took everything he learned at the church out into the wider world. His band played paid gigs at parties and TV stations, and once brokered a plan where they watched movies for free at a local theater in exchange for performances.
“At intermission, we’d rock and roll!” Penuelas says.
Though they never “made it big,” his band enjoyed cranking out covers of popular Eagles and Doobie Brothers tunes.
Penuelas kept with music, performing with his high school choir and in musicals like The Music Man and South Pacific. Later he studied voice at Pan American University in Edinburg (now the University of Texas at PanAm) and as adult, joined various community bands and chorales, while building his daytime career in social work and public safety.
Paying it forward at Tamayo House
Today, Saenz, a Youth Development Coach, and Penuelas, a caseworker, bring their decades of knowledge to their work at Tamayo House, a halfway house in Harlingen, where they relish the opportunity to help youth find the emotional lift music can provide.
“Music can open a lot of doors for them, even if they’re very passive about it, it can release a lot of stress. They can write a song about how they’re feeling, and play the guitar at the same time. Without using any drugs or alcohol, they can lose themselves playing guitar and at the same time it creates a discipline,” Penuelas said.
For youth who’ve suffered traumatic childhoods, as so many at TJJD have, and may be slow to trust, playing music can be both quell social anxiety and provide a bridge to connect with others.
“It’s the universal language,” says Saenz, who’s worked at TJJD for 23 years, the last 12 at Tamayo.
He began teaching guitar to interested youth more than a decade ago, alongside Youth Development Coach Derek Rivera, a former music teacher who then led the lessons at Tamayo. They taught mainly on weekends, when the schedule allowed, but with the support of Tamayo leadership, now helmed by Superintendent Eduardo Garza.
Last year, Garza and TJJD leaders boosted the program by adding three new guitars and several rhythm drums.
“This program exemplifies what we’re trying to do with the Texas Model, helping youth to feel empowered and extend themselves and try new things,” Garza said. “That works so well when they have caring role models like Saenz and Penuelas.”
Saenz, 49, teaches the boys as he learned, not reading music, but playing by ear and feel. He stresses four key aspects to keep progressing: “I tell them, first picture it in your mind; then feel the music; then express it through the instrument and four, the most important part, is to share it.”
Sharing is important because it builds human connections and commitment to the music, Saenz said. He’s written music for relatives including a song for a cousin who lost his son. “It was like his soul was speaking to me. I think it’s a beautiful song. It’s about his son and his relationship.”
Saenz works in inspirational stories about musicians, recounting, for instance, how legendary guitarist Eric Clapton “went through a dark time when he lost his 7 year old son.”
“He went through a depression. But he expressed all those feelings through his music and he gave us a gift -- that song, ‘Tears in Heaven’. You can really feel what he was expressing and we can also feel for a loved one or a friend,” Saenz said.
He encourages the boys to express themselves and not worry about matching what others can do. He tells them there’s no “bad” music, if a person is expressing their feelings.
Once he sees a Tamayo student is striving to learn, Saenz tries to provide the music the young man loves, whether its blues, rock, country or Tejano. Recently, he helped a young man learn a Hendrix-style version of the Star Spangled Banner, a song the youth wanted to learn to share with his father.
“I try to simplify the music they’re liking and once they see it’s possible to play the songs they like, it just encourages them to want to play more. I demonstrate what you can do, but from then on it’s about them and what they want to do.”
Penuelas, 61, who’s been at TJJD for 15 years, teaches guitar and drums to Tamayo youth. The drums appeal to young men who’re working out rap rhythms or lyrics.
Like Saenz, he’s motivated to spread the happiness music brings and help the youth learn something they can take with them, whether it’s the start of a hobby, vocation or just positive memories.
“They can play guitar wherever they go and they can also teach their kids the guitar. It’s a fun instrument to play,” Penuelas said.
“I tell them it’s like riding a bicycle, you never forget, but if you don’t practice you cannot be doing those wheelies,” Saenz said.
Both men say they’re glad that the program is stronger than ever, with a better equipped music room that tempts youth to try the strings.
“There’s been a lot of youth who’ve taken advantage of this and learned a lot,” Saenz said, “and when I see how excited they get that’s just a great feeling.
(Photos: Top - Israel Saenz works with a student in a private lesson. Bottom - Gerardo Penuelas poses with three of his music students.)