David Toelardo has a gift for taking raw material and shaping it into something polished and beautiful. So he’s a perfect fit as a mentor at the Española Teen Technology Center, the after-school YMCA hangout.
“The five kids that I have on a Tuesday, that keeps five kids out of the street,” Toelardo said. “Or maybe even getting killed, maybe overdosing. It’s just something that I have a passion for.”
Toelardo is at the Center nearly every day, but Tuesdays are special. From 4 to 7 p.m. he meets with a small group in the Center’s lapidary shop and helps them transform stones — usually made of agate, a relatively soft quartz and clay mix — into jewelry centerpieces. They start with the rough stone and then cut it, polish it to a high gloss and form a shape.
“They’re stuck on arrowheads and hearts,” Toelardo said, laughing. “Which is alright, that’s no problem. But I mean every one of ‘em — they’ve gotta do a heart, they’ve gotta do an arrowhead.”
Toelardo said he’s trying to use more local stones. Students have begun bringing in their own, and sometimes they’ll go stone-hunting right at the Center.
“I’ve taken them to just outside the YMCA,” Toelardo said. “I tell ‘em, ‘Hey, this one is polishable, we’ll try it.’ And it just amazes them that they’ve been stepping on them every day.”
Miguel Perez, 14, has become a Level Four student in Toelardo’s class over the course of the last year. If he reaches Level Five, the highest level, he’ll be able to cut stones and finish jewelry pieces without supervision.
“I’ve always loved to shape things, like wood,” Perez said. “Then I figured out I could shape rocks and I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
Student C.J. Trujillo, 11, said he became interested in the lapidary class when Toelardo showed him some finished products. Trujillo said his favorite shape is a round pendant, and he gives away his work as gifts.
“I either give it to my family or some of my friends,” Trujillo said.
Toelardo is now employed with the Center as a counselor, but he still racks up hours of unpaid volunteer service together with his girlfriend, Corine Sena, who helps with everyday operations as well as a beading portion of the lapidary workshop.
As 2008 drew to a close, Center Director Ben Sandoval decided that he should join YMCAs across the country in naming a volunteer of the year. He looked over the activity logs for some 17 volunteers, and saw that Toelardo and Sena had put in the most hours.
The couple received a plaque Dec. 19 during the Center’s Christmas party.
“Their sheer presence every day is inspiring to the kids,” Sandoval said. “They see the dedication, they see the desire to want to help them. They have become an extended part of their family, that’s how they feel.”
Wounds To Art
Toelardo is a disabled Army veteran who learned how to work with stones while he was a patient at a V.A. hospital in Colorado.
“I just got addicted to it,” Toelardo said. “I just loved to do the art.”
Toelardo is originally from El Guique, and he moved back to Northern New Mexico three or four years ago, from Oregon. While looking for local arts and crafts shows he met Sandoval. This was back before the Center existed, and Toelardo told Sandoval he was interested in opening a shop to teach young people about the lost art of working with stones.
Toelardo said as a recovering alcoholic and addict, he knew the community needed something.
“I grew up in this part of the country, so I know what it is to have nothing to do,” he said.
Sandoval said in the beginning, talking to the students about the formation of rocks and their hidden inner beauty seemed to spark an immediate interest.
“I think the kids are naturally drawn to rocks and minerals,” Sandoval said. “Most children, when you talk to them, they’ve collected at some point in their lives.”
At Toelardo’s first class, more than a year ago, 14 teens showed up.
“I said, ‘Well hold on, there’s no way,’” he said. “They were pretty passionate. I had a lot of ‘em.”
Because of safety issues with the lapidary machinery, he tries to keep classes to five or fewer pupils. So he set up two classes, on Tuesdays and Fridays. That has been scaled back recently, but not because of a lack of interest. Toelardo said he’s never had fewer then eight students for the beading portion of the class, and he’s sometimes had up to 16 or 18.
But something had to go — the current recession has hit non-profit organizations particularly hard, and the Center has cut back on every aspect of its programming, Sandoval has said.
“With our budget cutting, we just saw fit to do just one class right now,” Toelardo said.
Toelardo said while funding is the major obstacle for the Center, his program also needs local investment and support. He secured one of the lapidary wheels as a donation from a California company, and an Albuquerque jeweler has donated thousands of beads.
“I know locally there’s a lot of people that do collect stones and do various lapidary functions, and I haven’t seen anybody donate their time — which would be nice,” he said. “I’d like to see a lot more community involvement.”
The Española Teen Technology Center is open Monday through Thursday from noon to 7 p.m. and Friday from 2 to 9 p.m. Memberships cost $40 per year or $20 for six months, and can be paid for one dollar at a time. Teens aged 13 to 19 are eligible to join.
The Center is located at 808 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Road, next to the Española Fire Department and Senior Center. For more information, call 747-6569.