Charting a New Course

In a boat-building shop on the Potomac River, teens in deep trouble launch new lives.

Boats and Second Chances

Victor Zelaya had the look of someone who wished he was almost anywhere else. He stood with his probation officer in front of a small building that looked like a seaside cottage, two stories with dormer windows. Except that it was a boat-building shop, floating on the gentle waters of the Potomac River.

Walking inside, Zelaya was enveloped by the shriek of power saws and the stinging smell of varnish and fresh-cut lumber. Poker-faced youths hovered over wood and canvas, giving shape to a mini-flotilla of new boats.

The 16-year-old was taken over to a middle-aged man who stood chatting with a young worker. Joe Youcha glanced up and took in this newest arrival: a husky kid with his pants slung low, his arms splashed with tattoos, and a face boiling with anger.

Youcha was used to it. So many apprentices were like this, at first. That's why they came to his workshop in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a chance to turn things around -- for some, probably a last chance.

On that spring morning in 2000, Vick Zelaya was getting his shot at a new life after serving 18 months in the state reformatory. Over the clatter and banging, Youcha told him the way it works: "You start at $6.50 an hour and go up 50 cents for every two weeks of perfect attendance. If you're absent or late, you're docked. If you miss two days, you're out."

Zelaya merely shrugged. Youcha's eyes remained locked on his, as if challenging the young man to prove everyone wrong.

Youcha's lifework is built around a simple fact: He has a rare knack for connecting with kids in trouble. Which is remarkable because Youcha doesn't come from their world. He was raised in a comfortable, close-knit family in Rockland County, New York, and graduated from Columbia University. But for 13 years he has spearheaded the Alexandria Seaport Foundation (ASF), an apprentice boat-building program that steers young outcasts onto the straight and narrow.

Coming out of college, Youcha had tried other jobs, including writing technical manuals for a company in Colorado. But the inspiration of his father, a tough street kid from New York City who "could have gotten in trouble but went to college instead to become a social worker," kept tugging him toward helping kids who were falling through the cracks. Youcha found a perfect way to combine this goal with a lifelong love of boats when, in 1992, he signed on with ASF as a volunteer instructor.

Almost immediately, Youcha was put in charge. He and the volunteers who worked for him -- many retired from the military -- also served as surrogate guardians to the youths.

It wasn't enough for Youcha, though. He wanted to reach the truly hardcore -- the kids who'd been expelled from school, plea-bargained out of court, bailed out of jail. Gang members, drug dealers, thieves. So he went to probation officers and juvenile court judges to get their advice. And his idea became a plan. His program would take in kids already in deep trouble, pay them above minimum wage to build boats, give them an education leading to a high school general equivalency diploma (GED), and help them find a job.

Youcha drummed up funding from corporations, foundations and individuals. The biggest break came after he made his pitch to Doug McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. "Tell me what you need," McCarron said.

"Jobs for my kids."

McCarron delivered. Those who graduated from the program with a GED and professional level skills were guaranteed a four-year apprenticeship with the carpenters union.

With that, Youcha could offer his students a tangible future.

Vick Zelaya was an infant when his mother, an immigrant housemaid, sent him to El Salvador to live with relatives. She didn't come get him until he was five. He grew up just outside of Washington, D.C. -- fatherless, his mother always working, mocked at school for his floundering English.

At 12 he joined a gang and roamed the night streets with them, coming home after drinking, and reeking of marijuana. At 14, after he was expelled from school, his mother begged him to quit hanging out with thugs. "The gang is my family," Vick said to her, and he left home.

Soon he had become the keeper of the gang's weapons. One night, Zelaya was told that gang members were going to "take care" of some people; he produced a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. But he refused to go along on the mission, saying, "I can't shoot a guy for nothing."

The police swiftly rounded up the triggermen and traced the weapons to Zelaya. He spent the next year and a half in a state reformatory, mulling over the dead end he'd reached at 15. In the reformatory school, he completed the 7th and 8th grades in one year and came out wanting to get his life on track.

More Than a Launching Pad

Shortly after his release, his gang "family," convinced that he had betrayed them, cornered him on the street and beat him bloody before police intervened. Zelaya didn't know where to go now, or what to do. But his probation officer thought of something. "I know a program that takes guys in situations like yours," he told Vick. "I could call down there." That's when Joe Youcha entered Zelaya's life.

By the time Vick arrived at ASF, Youcha had built things up to the point where he'd graduated 120 apprentices. Today, Youcha can count at least 230 kids who've been through his program. Paid instructors, as well as volunteers, see to it that the youths earn their GED on-site. Experienced teachers handle courses like English and history, while math is incorporated into the workshop regimen.

Each instructor works with no more than six apprentices. A plan, tailored for each individual, includes counseling, continuing education, and help with such needs as drug treatment.

Those qualifying for the apprenticeship with the carpenters union are given a tool set and a starting salary of $28,000 a year, plus benefits. After that, the future is theirs to claim or forfeit.

Given their backgrounds, it's not an easy path for most of the kids. Alfredo* has to pay restitution for wrecking a mall shop; his instructor, Steve Hernandez, helps him set up a bank account that automatically sends $50 a month to the shopkeeper. At 19, Benis left to raise his infant daughter alone when the mother "took a walk"; ASF works with him to find a permanent caregiver.

One in three youths fall out of the program. Among those whom Youcha failed to help was an 18-year-old apprentice who got in a fight outside school, fled prosecution, and was finally jailed for two years. Another kid graduated from ASF, only to slide back into the street life and die of a bullet to the head during a drug transaction.

For many weeks, Youcha couldn't tell how Vick Zelaya would fare. On his first day on the job, Youcha gave him some sandpaper and a strip of plywood and told him to go with the grain. Then he walked away.

He thinks I'm just another piece of dirt from the street, Zelaya thought to himself: That's the last I'll see of the big boss.

Ten minutes later, Youcha was back to take a look and assured Zelaya he was doing okay. And thereafter Youcha was rarely more than a raised hand away, telling the boy things he needed to know -- like there were 12 inches in a foot. "He told it to me as though he was sharing a secret," Zelaya says. "I didn't feel ashamed."

Still, Vick resisted the discipline that ASF demands. It was "do this, do that, study, work," he recalls. He snuck out at night, against Youcha's rules, to go drinking with buddies. Less than a year into the program, he suddenly quit and took a job at a local seafood restaurant. It was near ASF, and Vick kept running into Joe, who would urge him to return to his apprenticeship. Within a few weeks, Zelaya was back.

Even then, he balked at taking academic classes. "I've had enough school," he would say. "I'll learn what I need to know [on the shop floor]."

"You'll learn enough to earn minimum wage here," said Youcha. "You can be better. You are better. This is only a launching pad, Vick."

* Some names have been changed to protect privacy.

Over time, Youcha got through to Zelaya. No one told Vick to buy a belt and hoist his pants up to his waist, but he did, and he began wearing a long-sleeved shirt to cover his tattoos. When an older trainee spit on the floor one day, Zelaya said to him, "Hey, man, that's not professional; this is our workplace." The youth was feeling an unfamiliar emotion -- pride.

"I couldn't see into this future they kept telling me about," he says. "That was too far away. But I could see the boat I was working on take shape, and I could see my new life."

After the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Youcha's boys made the news in an unexpected way. Joe set all hands working on a model of an Indonesian crab boat, thousands of which had been destroyed in the disaster. It became the most compelling display in a fund-raising tour to replace the lost crabbers. In one swing around the country, it helped raise enough to build 80 boats, sending hundreds of beached fisherman back to sea. A local television station named Youcha a "Hometown Hero" for initiating the idea.

Victor Zelaya has his own success story at last. He stayed on at ASF for three years, and has volunteered since then as an instructor. In 2003, he set out with his GED and a van the foundation helped him buy -- and Youcha taught him to drive. Now Zelaya has a wife, a baby son and a home.

With his new skills, he's had no trouble finding rewarding work, but he hasn't yet joined the carpenters union. When Youcha asked him why, Vick said, "I was afraid I'd goof and make you look bad."

"You, goof?" said Joe. "Never. You're the reason I'm in this business." It's something that Youcha says to all his kids. And it's always true.