Striking a chord
Tony Barnes finds and makes peace through music
By Lisa Snider 11/13/2008
“Am I going too fast?” asks Tony Barnes as he unloads a pile of binders and papers. A certificate of recognition from Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, awarded just last month, peaks through alongside a string of handwritten notes from children. The founder of Peace Thru Music stopped everything six years ago to devote all of his time to teaching music and conflict resolution to children. Today his energy is fresh and his infectious ideas are striking a chord with everyone he meets.
The journey that led Barnes to establish Peace Thru Music, a non-profit charity, is an odd sort of “School of Rock” story, but the 44-year-old lifelong Ventura county resident is no Jack Black. Adopted at birth, only to have his adoptive parents divorce when he was three, Barnes was raised in an abusive home. As a result, he acted out in school, bullying the other kids and making his teachers crazy.
“I brought my troubles to school,” he says, adding bits and pieces to the story of his nightmarish childhood enduring physical, mental and sexual abuse. “My formative years were very horrific.”
When his fourth grade teacher couldn’t handle him, another teacher took notice and gave him an ultimatum: “You’re out of here or you can start today,” Barnes recalls his fifth-grade teacher, Paul Jablonowski, saying to him so many years ago.
It was that ultimatum and a guitar that turned Barnes around.
“Music was my only out,” says Barnes, who remembers teaching himself to play on a three-string guitar at home as a means to escape. At school, Jablonowski brought a guitar from home and sang John Denver songs with him. Now a principal at Blanche Reynolds School in Ventura, Jablonowski remembers those days all too well. “He was going through a really rough patch,” he recalls. “I would see him on the playground…and he would just be really angry.”
Jablonowski, at the time new to his career and admittedly idealistic, wanted to reach out to his pupil. “I took it kind of personally that I was going to do what I could.” His efforts paid off. “There was a change in him,” says Jablonowski. “Tony really connected with the music.” Barnes gives all due credit to his mentor Jablonowski. “He’s the reason why I’m pretty much doing what I do,” says Barnes, who today still struggles with the ghosts of his childhood, but finds solace in music.
As an adult, Barnes went to work for Ventura County as a probation officer. After getting his degree in sociology from Cal State Northridge, he went into teaching. At Oxnard’s Curren Elementary School and Sheridan Way Elementary in Ventura’s Avenue district, Barnes brought music into the classroom and his fifth and sixth-grade students flourished. “I taught history with music, math with music, reading . . ..”
Remembering one student with a dysfunctional home life who brought a bullet to class, Barnes says, “He reminded me of me.” Through music, Barnes was able to connect with that student and many others who had never even touched an instrument. It was his ability to positively influence kids through music, and the image of a peace sign with a treble clef wrapped around it that he drew at just seven years-old, that pushed Barnes to start his non-profit. He believed so strongly that he sold everything he had and quit his job teaching. Barnes says Peace Thru Music is not political or religious, it’s much closer to home.
“We have wars in our communities, we have it on the playground,” says Barnes, a divorced father with two teenage boys who encourages kids to express themselves and address their conflicts non-violently. To, “Pick on strings, not living things.”
Since its inception, Peace Thru Music has worked with county schools and the Boys and Girls Club to put countless instruments into children’s hands through donations and fundraisers. To keep the instruments flowing, though, Barnes may need to go back to work full-time. “We need support, we need donations,” he says, adding that they could use a few dedicated Board members, too.
Fortunately, Barnes has a bevy of well-known local musicians willing to step up and help. Nathan McEuen has given his voice and production talents to create a compilation CD with all proceeds going to Peace Thru Music. Other musicians on the CD include Crosby Loggins, Shades of Day, Todd Hannigan and Delaney Gibson, who will perform alongside several other artists at the CD release party at Bombay Bar & Grill on November, 14.
E-mail Lisa Snider at findingojai@aol.com.
Tickets, which include the CD are available through the Bombay Bar & Grill box office or www.myspace.com/nathanmceuen. For more information, go to www.peacethrumusic.org.
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