Teens Get Lessons to Build On

For Joshua, a teenager at a juvenile detention camp high in the Cleveland National Forest, the huge playhouse with the gaudy coat of yellow paint wasn’t so much a class project as an expression of his personality.

“Hey, it was better than playing cards and fighting,” he said.

The playhouse is the brainchild of Natividad “Nati” Alvarado Jr., a carpentry teacher from Capistrano-Laguna Beach Regional Occupational Program who was assigned to Los Pinos Conservation Camp.

With hammers and nails, Alvarado, himself an alumnus of the school of hard knocks, introduces creativity and construction basics to some of the 128 Orange County youths at the camp.

“I wanted them to know the names of different parts of a house,” Alvarado said, “you know, like rafters, top braces, king studs and trimmers. So if . . . a foreman asked, ‘What’s this?’ they would know.”

But now with two playhouses nearly finished, ROP is looking to donate one and sell the other. The playhouses are the first ROP project at Los Pinos, and Alvarado hopes that any money raised will help buy materials for future building projects.

“They were going to be donated to Orangewood [Children’s Home], but they could not accept them because they were too big,” said Dennis Snyder, Los Pinos’ director.

Instead, the 7-foot-high, 5-foot-wide playhouses will be trucked to the ROP offices in San Juan Capistrano and stored there for now.

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Founded in 1970, Los Pinos is operated by the Orange County Probation Department. It is a vocational camp for males 16 to 18 for three months to a year. Most of the offenders have committed felonies, including weapons offenses and multiple probation violations.

For the youths, taking Alvarado’s class is an opportunity. It helps break up a monotonous camp routine that involves getting up, eating, taking academic classes and keeping the campus clean.

When Alvarado started the nine-week class, he had no wood. He bought some hand tools such as a power saw and a router. Then he discovered a treasure trove of wood.

Soon, most of the boys began to enjoy Alvarado’s class, especially when the 36-year-old instructor, who says he is an ex-gang member from Santa Ana, allowed the youths to listen to rap songs on a radio.

“There wasn’t much here when I started,” Alvarado said. “I went and got nail bags for the boys and found some old wood stored in the back. I looked at the wood and said, ‘Here is where we’ll get our materials for the playhouses.’ ”

The boys trimmed the wood into 2-inch-by-2-inch strips of varying lengths. These were to serve as studs to help frame the playhouse. Their teacher bought plywood sheaths for the walls, cedar shingles for the roof, and he had the boys saw their own window openings and paint.

“Every day, I started with a lecture,” Alvarado said. “OK guys, what are these? And they would say, ‘Trimmer.’ And, these? ‘Rafters.’ We would go through the entire project so they wouldn’t be ignorant of the parts of the house.”

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The goal is to provide a bridge for the at-risk youths, Snyder said. Each youth taking the course will receive a certificate notifying potential employers of their achievement.

“The idea is to have the boys enter an ROP in the community when they leave here and then have a chance for employment,” Snyder said.