When Tim Cuellar found out he had won a national talent competition, he thought the announcement was fake.
He and his fellow finalists from Green Hill School in Chehalis had been ushered into a room to hear the announcement months after he submitted his Kids Got Talent entry. It was hot, and Cuellar was just waiting for the announcement to end so he could go.
Then, he was told that out of hundreds of entries from across the nation, Cuellar and his entry — a performance of his original song — had been selected as the solo-winner of the Kids Got Talent competition and he would be going to Nashville in August to perform at a national conference.
Cuellar said he didn’t react at first. Then he started laughing.
“I was surprised,” he told The Chronicle. “I don’t feel like I had the right to think ‘oh yeah, it was me.’ There’s other people who have talent too.”
But Cuellar’s talent was obvious to Green Hill Superintendent Jennifer Redman, who said hearing Cuellar sing in his dorm and at Green Hill events motivated her to ensure Green Hill students got the chance to enter the Kids Got Talent competition this year.
“Hearing him sing, it’s amazing. It’s emotional to be honest,” Redman said. “He is one of the most beautiful voices that I’ve ever heard in my life … so the talent is quite amazing and I felt pretty strongly that we absolutely had an individual here who was capable of winning.”
Kids Got Talent is put on annually by Performance-based Standards (PbS), a national program for juvenile justice facilities to monitor and improve conditions and rehabilitation services for youth, with the goal of showcasing the talents of youths involved with juvenile rehabilitation facilities and programs. Contestants submit an audio or video recording of their talents and then a panel of expert and celebrity judges assess each contestant’s overall performance, presence and originality to select the winner.
While PbS has hosted the competition every year since 2015, Green Hill has never participated.
After hearing Cuellar sing in early 2020, Redman made a mental note to keep an eye on the Kids Got Talent deadlines so Green Hill could advertise the competition for students and help them film their entries.
It never materialized. Then COVID-19 hit, and Redman forgot all about the competition.
But in early March, Redman said she happened to be on PbS’s website when she saw a notice about the deadlines for the 2021 Kids Got Talent competition — which were at the end of the month.
“We quickly made flyers, we flyered the living unit and just said ‘hey, if anybody’s interested, just let us know,’” said Redman.
Roughly 12 students responded, including Cuellar.
“I worked pretty hard to sing the way I do now. I don’t think I’m great or anything but I’ve gotten pretty good,” he said.
Cuellar, 20, first started singing and writing music as a way to cope and pass the time, but as he practiced and got better, he found music was something he was truly passionate about.
“The music that I listen to inspires me and I would also like to inspire other people, people that are going through the same thing that I’m going through or that I’ve been through,” he said.
The original song he performed for Kids Got Talent is titled “Explícame,” which translates to “explain to me.” The lyrics are sung in Spanish and he accompanied himself on guitar.
“It’s a love song, so it’s something along the lines of getting my heart broken,” said Cuellar.
Green Hill put together a judging panel to review the students’ entries and ultimately nine were cleared to audition.
With help from the Chehalis School District communication team, which volunteered to film and edit the audition tapes, Green Hill submitted all nine of its entries before the deadline.
“Because we were on a tight timeline, we literally had one week to get the audition tapes in, so that really helped with the acoustics and to put forth a good product and not just a cell phone video, which would have been the route we would have had to take,” said Redman.
PbS released a list of contest finalists in late June: one of Green Hill’s contestants received an honorable mention, and the rest were all listed as finalists.
“They’re a very talented group of guys,” said Redman.
PbS called Redman a week later to announce Cuellar had won the whole competition.
When asked how she felt about Cuellar’s win, Redman said, “I feel proud to be able to be in the presence of Tim and listen to him singing. I feel proud that I have staff on this campus who allow him to play his guitar down the wing … who have promoted him kind of perfecting his craft for quite a while … It’s beyond me, it’s really the staff who work with him day in and day out.”
Cuellar will perform in person at a PbS national conference in Nashville on Aug. 13.
“We could do it with Zoom, which would have been acceptable especially with COVID going on, but it’s not the same,” said Redman, adding that Green Hill is hoping to fly Cuellar’s mom down to Nashville to watch him perform.
PbS is also working to get some talent recruiters into the conference, “which may open up some opportunities for Tim, because that’s really what PbS is about, it’s about uplifting young people, not about us sitting there watching him sing, which made it even more important for us to be able to take him there and provide him with an opportunity that he may never get,” said Redman.
Cuellar said the programs he has completed at Green Hill have opened up a variety of career options for when he’s released later this year, but he wants to have a career in music if he can make it work.
“If I can somehow make it with music, I would — I would do anything to do that, honestly. It was just never something that I focused completely on because some people just wasted a lot of time recording music and they never make it anywhere. I just hope that that’s not me, you know. That’s why I don’t just focus on one single thing, because what if it doesn’t work out for me,” he said.
In the meantime, he’s continuing to write music.
“I would just like to inspire other people and make them feel like other people have gone through things that they’re going through,” he said.
