by KIM HILSENBECK
Listening to juvenile detainees reading poetry may not be commonplace for most people, but for Isaac Torres, director of the Sowing Education and Empowerment in Daily Speech (SEEDS) education program, it’s his job – and one he created at that.
Now in its second year at the Hays County Juvenile Detention Center in San Marcos, the SEEDS program serves about 13 juveniles. A new twist is that Torres has a class of young women this year. Last year, the program only served young men.
“It’s been a whole different approach, dynamic and response,” said Torres.
Developed as part of the broad outreach at the Center for P-16 Initiatives at Texas State University, SEEDS is a linguistics-based curriculum focused on enriching the communication skills of young Central Texans.
“My initial goal was to introduce the power of language to these kids in the juvenile detention center,” Torres said. “But I’m finding more and more that it’s serving as an emotional healing as well.”
Torres said many of the kids in the program are hardened; they come from backgrounds that include abuse, neglect, bad foster care experiences and worse.
“They carry heavy burdens on the inside – psychological, emotional and social,” Torres said. “But they are also easy to engage.”
Torres said the SEEDS metaphor is that each word is a “seed” containing vital information about the speaker and/or writer, and that each word should be chosen carefully.
And Torres knows of which he speaks. His own childhood and early adult years were filled with some of the same experiences as the students he teaches.
When Torres was two years old, his single, 20-year-old mother took him and his older brother from Los Angeles to Oregon with a man she barely knew – far away from family and support systems.
After watching his brother go to jail and himself dropping out of high school, Torres worked a series of low-paying jobs, but said he always knew that life wasn’t for him.
“I had to make a change,” Torres said. “My life was all about death, depression and incarceration.”
At 25, Torres met a woman named Heather who was dating a friend. She saw a spark in him, he said.
She told him he needed to apply for financial aid and go to the University of Oregon. Torres remembers telling her he didn’t even graduate from high school.
“She took me to get my GED. Then she showed me how to do all the college stuff,” Torres said.
Eleven years later, Torres is giving back what he learned.
One of the first things he tells his students is they need to forgive their parents and those around them who created some of the bad situations.
“There is a heavy bitterness in their hearts,” Torres said. “Using creative writing, reading poetry and learning about language is just a tool to open doors within them.”
Upon release from the juvenile center, Torres gives each of his students a packet of their writings.
“I empower them with language,” he said.