Joe Hu/Town Crier A Mariano Castro Elementary School student performs a piano solo at the end-of-the-year showcase for the Homework Club students. Seated next to her is her Apollo Club mentor from Mountain View High School.

The sound of music wafts through the multipurpose room of Mariano Castro Elementary School in Mountain View as fifth-grade musicians of the Homework Club prepare to show off skills learned from their high school mentors.

Over the past three years on Friday afternoons, Mountain View High School students, members of the Apollo Club, have visited Castro school to provide after-school music lessons to 22 of the school’s fifth-graders. For one hour a week, the classrooms in the back of the school that house the Castro School Homework Club are turned into a rehearsal hall replete with the sounds of instruments and lively conversations between teens and their younger protégés.

Music instruction has been a priority for Carla Tarazi, principal of Castro. She encourages all fifth-graders to take up an instrument or join the chorus. Before the Apollo Club started, most Castro students who attended Homework Club were not receiving the extra support and guidance they needed. Only a handful of them were playing in the school’s band or orchestra. Private music lessons were economically infeasible for most students’ families.

As Tarazi brainstormed ways to provide musical assistance to her students, Mountain View High School students Justin Woo and Stephen Hess, who are now seniors, were putting the final touches on a plan for a new club at their school. Their proposal to Tarazi and Homework Club Director Virginia Bailey in September 2003 fused the dream with a solution.

Mountain View High School has a renowned music program that attracts students to the campus. But incoming students who don’t have command of an instrument by the time they get to high school have difficulty catching up and are thus unable to participate in the marching band or other music groups.

During their freshman year at MVHS, Justin and Stephen sought an avenue to offer the school’s many musicians an opportunity to earn community service hours, which are required for graduation, and at the same time bridge the experience gap so that a larger cross-section of incoming students could join the high school’s music program.

“With the additional help of the Apollo Club every Friday afternoon, our students get extra practice and are making amazing progress,” Tarazi said. Most of those students who have been mentored by the high schoolers have gone on to play at Graham and Crittenden middle schools.

This year the band at Castro Elementary is so large the school needs a second music teacher for the regular whole group instruction, and the strings section alone boasts 16 students.

Justin, who is responsible for assigning the club members their lessons, has “never let one of our students down,” Bailey said. “Even the afternoon of the big homecoming dance, he made sure that every one of our students received their lesson.”

Since the program began, the tutors have provided more than 1,200 service hours.