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.)

Several TJJD campuses boast thriving edible gardens either as free-standing projects or part of the horticulture programs offered by Lone Star high schools.

These include two new promising gardens installed this spring at Ayres and Tamayo halfway houses, where students and staff carved out backyard beds and planted peppers, melons and other edibles.

Meanwhile, the large established gardens at the Gainesville and Edinburg facilities are bursting with life this June as tomatoes, squash, corn and greens mature and companion flowers bloom, brightening the campus and inviting beneficial insects like butterflies and ladybugs.

These venues provide students with opportunities to learn about horticulture and earn certificates they can use when they are ready for work.

At Gainesville, horticulture teacher Steven Seeds (whose parents apparently knew he was destined for this work) oversees sprawling outdoor beds and a greenhouse packed with flowers and vegetable plants where he and his horticulture students learn about planting and pruning, soils and amendments and how to vanquish plant pests.

Seeds’ gardens are a revolving cornucopia, with this year’s beds containing three types of corn, potatoes, Swiss chard, onions, cucumbers, wildflowers and cherry, Roma and beefsteak tomatoes. Serrano and jalapeno peppers grow in the greenhouse.

His horticulture students enjoy tending the gardens because they get to see and sample the fruits of their efforts, says Lone Star North Principal Eric LeJeune. “The kids love the little peppers, they really like the hot stuff.”

The youth also appreciate learning the applied sciences of horticulture and landscaping because it helps build skills they can use to get jobs at nurseries or landscaping companies, LeJeune and Seeds said. These vocations provide great entry-level jobs and also opportunities for creating one's own business, Seeds said.

Beyond that, many of the kids also already understand that gardens are an adjunct to self-sufficiency, a way to supplement one’s income and assure well-fed families.

“A lot of them tell me they have had gardens at home, mostly with grandparents, they tell me grandparents have instilled gardening with them,” said Seeds who’s managed the Gainesville program for five years following 40 years teaching a variety of vocational classes at North Texas schools in St. Joseph and Maybank.

“I like to help these kids, a lot of them have never had the help they needed,” he said. “They like for people to get in there and teach them stuff and help them to create a job for themselves when they get out.”

Over the last four years, some 100 students at the Gainesville campus have earned the Texas Nursery Landscape Association’s state certificate, he said. That has real meaning when they apply for work with nurseries or landscape companies.

At the Evins facility in Edinburg, horticulture teacher Timothy Hinds manages the classes and the plots. Hinds and his students grow tomatoes, carrots, greens and watermelon. He says the vegetable gardens will virtually shut down in the middle of the high hot season in July and August.

At Gainesville, too, the horticulture program will take a pause in the middle of summer, though students can continue with the book-learning aspect of the program.

Then soon it will time to plan and plant the fall gardens.