Summer Enrichment Program at The Studio at WESST

By Tom Ragan | May 12, 2025

One of the most rewarding experiences for me since I’ve been at WESST happened this last summer with the New Mexico Public Education Department’s Summer Enrichment Program.

The New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED) launched the Summer Enrichment Program in 2021 with federal pandemic relief funding.  The Summer Enrichment Program provided high school students with paid internships in government agencies and community organizations. I saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a program to empower student filmmakers with real world experience and provide WESST clients with necessary video content for their small businesses.

We had six students and paired each of those students with a WESST client:

• Ryan G. and Santo Samurai

• Kay R. and Amy Lynn Couch/Altar Consciousness

• Destiney M. and Amanda Powers/Enchanted Farms Mushrooms

• William M. and Rose Velasquez/Hiring Hub

• Hannah C. and Marsha Souers/Fire of Sandia

• Voida C. and Roe LiBretto/Allegorical Art

Student interns and their WESST partner clients.

The inaugural cohort of interns consisted of three soon-to-be high school juniors and three soon-to-be college freshmen.  The majority of students were from the New Mexico Academy of Media Arts, and the remaining two were from the Career Enrichment Center and the Digital Arts & Technology Academy, respectively.  A wonderful hodgepodge of eclectic teenagers, these students proved to be a tremendous group of individuals, full of potential in video production and storytelling.

I’ve directed and produced videos for a long time now, but teaching young aspiring filmmakers the intricacies of producing content for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who are looking to WESST as the experts, was a new challenge for me. As I said at the screening finale at The Studio, “I’m not used to working with high school students on this extensive of a program, and beyond repeating myself over and over again, this was a wonderful experience for me.”

The small business clients were quite eclectic as well. We had a candlemaker, a muralist, a woodcarver, a mushroom farmer, an employment agency, and a fine artist; all with different needs and purposes for their video.

My mission for the beginning of the program was to prepare the interns to be to handle their own meetings, plans, shoots, and editing.  Each student would direct their own videos, working directly with their client, and then crew up for each other on those shoots as well.  This was something I wished I had coming out of film school; a real-world experience of working with actual clients who needed a video.

At the end of the eight weeks, I was so proud of how hard these young people worked and how well they all worked together. The WESST clients were so happy with their videos and felt honored to be a part of this experience. The students were thrilled about what they had done over the summer and had a new passion for pursuing film and video production as a career. As Destiney, one of the interns, said, “This was definitely a new experience for me. I never really thought of film exactly, but now I really do.”

This program truly was an enriching summer, not only for these students and clients, but for me as well, and I cannot wait until next summer to get a new crop of aspiring young filmmakers in The Studio at WESST.

Watch The Studio’s Summer Enrichment Program’s Final Screening here.