Westside High School and Avenue Scholars have come together to help students gain dual enrollment through Metropolitan Community College and paid internships through a program called Intern Omaha. Intern Omaha is a program that is new at Westside in the last few months and is available to juniors to apply for their senior year. Westside gained the opportunity through Former Superintendent Dr. Ken Bird, who is the current president of Avenue Scholars. Assistant Superintendent Mark Weichel said knowing Bird gave him hope that the program would do well.

“Dr. Bird and Millard public schools did a pilot this summer of this internship program,” Weichel said. “We heard a little bit about it and [the program] reached out to schools in the Metro who might be interested. Knowing Dr. Bird and seeing the results of that summer program that they did, we were excited to be apart of it.”

As well as encouraging students to take part in the internship, Westside is recruiting businesses in the area to participate. There will be two internships in the Westside district for selected students to take advantage of. 

“[Superintendent Mike Lucas and I] hosted three different breakfast meetings and one lunch meeting with different businesses in the area,” Weichel said. “If you think about it, we are recruiting different businesses to work with our interns and we are recruiting students to be those interns. We are going to be hosting two positions here in the district as well.”

In order to be apart of Intern Omaha, there is an application process and an interview. The fields that the internships fall under are business, information technology trades and automotive. Weichel said the process is very competitive and takes effort.

“Juniors will be applying for these jobs, and they are competitive jobs,” Weichel said. “Everybody that says they want to do it, isn’t going to get to do it. It’s going to be students that are going to be selected.”

If a student gets in, they will have a paid internship this summer and their entire senior year. At the end of the internship, the student will get dual enrollment credit from Metropolitan Community College. According to the Intern Omaha website, the internship is a good way to learn, earn money and credits as well as become more experienced in a certain field. 

All juniors at Westside High School are welcome to attend an informational meeting on Nov. 18 and 19 in room 220 at 5:30 p.m. Applications will be accepted through Dec. 2 to 20 and selections will be made Feb. 21 after an interview. Click here for more information about Intern Omaha.