Inspiring teacher puts down baton
Tim Wilson stood by the door of his classroom and watched the last of his band students leave for summer break.
“See ya, Mr. Wilson,” the boy said over his shoulder as he turned into the hallway. “Bye-bye, Brandon,” Wilson replied. And with that, it was over — not only a school year but also a four-year adventure in which the trumpet virtuoso, his career derailed by disease, found renewed passion in a Richmond middle school classroom teaching students not only to play music, but also how to believe in themselves.
Wilson turned back to his empty class-
room, his beloved band room, where the cacophony of adolescent squeals and squeaking musical instruments was now replaced by the soft hum of an air conditioner.
He stacked a few chairs on a rack and then, with a sigh, pulled one up and sat down. “It’s finished,” he said. The music teacher will not be back when classes at Lovonya DeJean Middle School start again in the fall. Whether the music program he built will remain is an open question.
When Wilson arrived in 2013, there hadn’t been a music program at the Richmond school for a decade. Now, school leaders, students and parents say they can’t imagine the sound of silence again in the band room. What Wilson brought to DeJean was so remarkable that his efforts were feted last month at City Hall, where Richmond Mayor Tom Butt and City Council members gave him a commendation and a standing ovation.
Wilson was no ordinary bandleader. He was a former principal trumpet player in the San Francisco Opera orchestra until a tragic twist of fate 14 years ago. Diagnosed with glaucoma, he was warned by a doctor that continuing to blow hard into a horn could blind him.
He eventually found teaching, and then he found DeJean, but the 58-year-old maestro has known since December that his mounting health problems would force him to leave. He knows he can no longer work the 12- to 14-hour days nourishing a music program at a school where 95 percent of students live in poverty, their lives often in upheaval.
But it was quite a four-year run: Wilson not only taught math and music but also bought dozens of instruments his students needed, hired additional staffers with his own money and created a marching band.
Dipping into his salary and opera pension, he spent $300,000 in all, according to his own estimates.
The music teacher’s final year at DeJean — profiled in April in a Chronicle story titled “Mr. Wilson’s second act” — had started in September with nursery rhymes. It ended in June with jazz, blues and Beethoven.
“Thank you so much for the love you provided to our children,” said Vice Mayor Jovanka Beckles at the City Council meeting where Wilson was honored. “Music is so healing. Beautiful people like you deserve appreciation.”
As the school year wound down, though, Wilson wasn’t coasting on such accolades.
He led his students as they marched and played in a Cinco de Mayo parade and as they filled in for a high school band
at a school district banquet.
All told, Wilson conducted 12 performances during the school year, including a rendition of the national anthem at the school’s eighth-grade promotion featuring a tuba, a sousaphone and crashing cymbals.
But it was the final concert in mid-May that gave Wilson’s students an opportunity to show off, performing for a full house in the school’s multipurpose room. The program included seven songs ranging from “Ecossaise for Military Band” by Beethoven to “Happy” by Pharrell Williams.
The applause was loud and lingering. Yet afterward, backstage, clarinet player Akasha DeAguero, 14, was in tears.
The students, with the principal, had prepared a presentation for Wilson, with flowers and a few speeches, but they had run out of time.
Akasha had wanted to tell Wilson, officially and in public, that she wished she could go back in time and apologize for things she said to him in anger, when she was more upset at life than him.
“I was going to say I’m going to miss him,” Akasha said later. “And I’m sad I won’t be able to come back and visit him.”
Band was her favorite class, a sentiment shared by many students on the last day of school.
Yet DeJean still doesn’t have anyone to take over the band program next year.
“We’re trying to figure out how to keep this going,” said Principal William McGee. And if he can’t find anyone? “Then we have to find another elective and the band ceases to exist.”
That is not an option Wilson is willing to consider. As he sat in his room after his last class of the year, he considered the dozens of instruments he still needed to inventory and organize for his replacement. It would take several hours.
He decided it could wait. Instead, he opened the purple, handmade card decorated with quarter notes and treble clefs that one of his students, with tears in her eyes, handed him earlier in the day.
On the cover was a quotation: “If you mess up, don’t give up, keep trying. — Mr. Wilson.”
The music teacher smiled. That message had been one of his mantras through the year. It had taken him weeks in some cases to coax the first notes out of flutes, to convince others they could play the saxophone or the trombone if they just tried.
Inside the card, Jocelyn, a flute player, thanked her teacher for an “amazing school year.”
Wilson read her message aloud: “Like music notes leave our instruments, you are leaving our school. Though I will tell you something: You 100 percent sure left a truly positive legacy.”
He turned the card over in his hand.
“That’s sweet,” he said. And then, ever the teacher, he added, “I like the way she chose to use a figurative comparison.”
While Wilson is leaving DeJean, he won’t stop teaching. He has taken a job starting in the fall at Hall Middle School in Larkspur, near his Corte Madera home, that won’t require the long days and nights preparing for concerts and taking broken instruments to a repair shop. He will teach math.
Wilson glanced around his classroom again before picking up another chair to stack.
Surrounding him, nearly from floor to ceiling, were posters and signs bearing classroom rules, musical notations and the myriad inspirational sayings he constantly repeated.
“My fingerprints are all over this room,” he said.
Within the next few days, it would all have to come down. But for the moment, the words remained, offering encouragement to an empty room.
“I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy,” one read. “I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.”
“Like music notes leave our instruments, you are leaving our school. Though I will tell you something: You 100 percent sure left a truly positive legacy.” Jocelyn, flute player, in a card for music teacher Tim Wilson