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.

• • Inspiring Stories
• • Friendship
• • Parenting Teens
• • Generation Y
• Family Life

• Teen Boot Camp: A Deadly Decision?
• Desperate parents are turning to "boot camp"-style rehabilitation centers to turn their troubled teens around. Do these programs work, or are they putting our kids at even greater risk?
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• Drugs: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask
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• The Rules of a Better Parent-Child Relationship
• The benefits of laying down the law(s)
• 
• The Alexandria Seaport Foundation
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