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.

“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.