After years of scraping by to teach young musicians, Waltrip band director says goodbye to HISD

For the last two decades, Jesse Espinosa instructed generations of Houston ISD student musicians. During his tenure at Waltrip High School, the Roaring Red Ram Band played district concerts, Super Bowl 51 events in town and ceremonies marking the second inauguration of former President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. The band won praise and awards. Throughout that time, Espinosa said he “scraped and scrapped” to keep the band competitive. Students wore tattered uniforms and some played instruments held together with duct tape and rubber bands. The band always needed more funding and resources, Espinosa said. It relied on fundraising and others’ donations — including help from elected officials — to make it to some of the biggest stages they have played. FOLLOW THE MONEY: New portal lets you see how Houston ISD is using $1.2 billion of federal COVID-19 relief money “I would always be asking for bread and water and at any given time,” he said recently, “I would get one or the other. Never both, all these years.” Espinosa said he is done scraping. He will leave HISD after the current school year for a job at another Houston school system. He used two words he said he hated using to describe how he felt: Burned out. The band will play a farewell show Saturday. “It’s not about making me happy,” Espinosa said. “It’s about giving the kids what they need to be successful and putting a teacher in a position where they don’t feel like it’s them against the world just to make something happen for their classroom.” In recent years, educators have left HISD for various reasons, exit surveys show. Data from last year’s surveys show nearly 30 percent of the 328 responding teachers left for another district in the Houston area. Espinosa’s relationship with music traces back to his childhood when the son of a construction worker and secretary really wanted to be an athlete. He was kind of a small kid back then, he said, so his mother put him in the school band instead. He picked up a trumpet and stuck with it. It was not until he got to Waltrip, where he met longtime band director Charlie Stevens, the man who would become his mentor, that Espinosa realized he wanted to teach music, ideally at HISD. At Waltrip, Stevens spoke to him about how music had helped him in life, and taught him it was OK to open up and share his feelings. More from Alejandro Serrano: 5-year HISD audit finds $300 million surplus as teacher pay continues to rank below other districts Espinosa joined the Army with a dream of one day following in Stevens’ footsteps. After his discharge, Espinosa was pushing shopping carts in a northwest Houston Sam’s Club a hot August day 20 years ago when he got a call from HISD saying the district needed an assistant band director at Lamar High School. Espinosa said he jumped at the chance. Fundraising needed “Representation mattered to me because I had not been taught by a Latino music educator up until that point,” said Eric Jimenez, one of Espinosa’s first students at Lamar who now is the assistant director of bands at Prairie View A&M. “I remember doing auditions for a solo in the marching show or auditions for leadership and he just had this way of making it significant and memorable. Even if you knew you didn’t have the talent yet — or the capability — he was the type of person that would say, ‘Hey, just give it a shot. At least you can be aware of what to expect for next year.’” At the end of that first year of teaching at Lamar, an assistant band director at Waltrip left. “That was an easy decision,” Espinosa said with a smile. He served as Stevens’ assistant for nearly a decade before taking over the program, he said. By then, Espinosa said, he already thought the fine arts were not well-supported at HISD. Around that time, another Waltrip alum who happened to be working on the production of Obama’s second inauguration saw the band was in the middle of a long application process to play in some of the celebratory events in Washington, Espinosa said. The band received an invitation, but needed $150,000 for the trip. Students held fundraiser after fundraiser — car washes and popcorn sales — but remained about $40,000 short seven days before the deadline. Their efforts garnered the attention of local media, including the Chronicle, which ran a feature that included a quote from a student saying: “Maybe, everybody could send a dollar.” Everybody, it seemed, did just that, Espinosa said. After the story ran, he received envelopes from all over with donations. U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee found donors for the rest of the money. MORE ON WALTRIP: It’s Washington, D.C., or bust for the Waltrip High School Ram Band “I had only heard of something like that before,” Espinosa said, likening it to a film. “That was year one. From there, it was like what do you next?” A lot, it turned out. Interest in the band grew, but support did not keep up, according to Espinosa and some members at the time. As a student, James Elam, who went on the first Washington trip as a freshman and another as a senior, said he could not understand why. “There would be a lot of issues where me or my fellow classmates at the time would have instruments start breaking or things stop working, and I would be the one that ends up fixing the instruments. And I’m the one that’s in high school,” said Elam, now an assistant band director under Espinosa at Waltrip. “It’s still the same issues, they have just tried to pass blame around.” Hope in equity push There is some hope things will change for the district of nearly 200,000 students, 79 percent of whom are considered economically disadvantaged and 61 percent “at-risk.” When new Superintendent Millard House II went on a listening tour last fall, educators and parents frequently told him the district needed wider support for the arts, as well as librarians and nurses. The feedback was supposed to help guide the district’s first strategic plan in years. House’s plan, unveiled in February, called for centralizing the funding of 11 positions — including an art or music teacher — as well as various programs, including fine arts, at every school in an effort to make the district more equitable. SOUND OFF: Houston ISD’s superintendent wanted input from the community. He’s getting an earful. Under the most recent iteration of the proposed budget for the upcoming year, fine arts would be centrally funded but campuses will have to hire the teachers. The board is scheduled to vote on the budget this month. HISD has ordered uniforms and instruments for students across the district, officials said at a Thursday night board meeting. Espinosa said he liked House’s proposed plan, but knew the superintendent “would have a very tall mountain to climb.” “I don’t think it should be 100 percent centralized,” he said, “but I think 100 percent decentralization is not good. There’s too much evidence of where those silos of success are here and there and then there is a lot of distress and undeserved areas of our district.” The current system, which grants principals wide discretion over their budgets, let him pick up what Stevens had created and mold the program further to what it has become, he acknowledged. He has grown tired, however, explaining the value of his program every time a new administrator arrived, sometimes with a new plan for allocating the school’s budget. He recounted an episode years ago in which he asked an administrator why the band could not get more support. “Can you at least give me a good reason?” he remembered asking. The band has always been good, he said he was told, so why worry? Espinosa said after he announced his plan to leave HISD, that administrator apologized. alejandro.serrano@chron.com - Houston mom of undocumented kids calls Abbott school idea racist: 'Not the before times' - Which Houston school districts pay teachers the most and least? Here's a look. - Texas Southern University's aviation program lands more funding as industry faces long-term demand - TEA official named lone superintendent finalist for charter network his office is investigating - Houston ISD temporarily reassigns Bellaire High School principal

After years of scraping by to teach young musicians, Waltrip band director says goodbye to HISD

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