X3 Internships: How Work-based Learning Keeps Students Engaged

Highland High School Senior, Cruz Rivas, speaking at an Instituto del Puente event.
As we head into 2025's legislative session, Future Focused Education is prepared with 2025 policy priorities, one of which aims to secure sustainable funding for paid work-based learning experiences for all students in New Mexico. We are prioritizing funding for work-based learning because we have heard time and time again from students that these are the experiences that they need to keep them engaged in school and in their communities. We are finding new reasons to be hopeful about the future because of students who are advocating for educational change across the state, like Cruz Rivas.
From Disengaged Student to Change-maker
Cruz Rivas will graduate from Highland High School in just a few months and begin pursuing a career in environmental engineering. He’s also deeply invested in advocating for educational changes throughout the state and eventually hopes to run for governor. But Cruz wasn’t always so motivated or involved in his education. In fact, there was a time when he thought about dropping out constantly. After quarantine, he had trouble caring about school. He’d been a track star in middle school, but after so long away, he’d gotten out of shape and didn’t see a future in track anymore. He lost the motivation he’d had during middle school.
“I went through my whole freshman year kind of debating if I should just drop out and get a GED or maybe just find work,” says Cruz.
Cruz is not alone. Disengagement rates are high all across the country and especially in New Mexico. Students have especially struggled to find relevance and meaning in the classroom in the wake of the pandemic, when whatever economic and social challenges they’d been facing suddenly intensified.
“If you were to take a stroll down the halls at Highland today, there is a good chance that you will find a majority of students ditching their classes sadly,” says Cruz. “They don't value their education; they don't see a point in it.”
Cruz hadn’t seen the point either. He’d felt frustrated at the lack of connection between what he was having to learn in the classroom and his life outside of it. But that started to change during his sophomore year. Cruz says he had a teacher who talked about different education systems and challenged Cruz to really think about what he’d like to see differently in school. Cruz ended up spending a year studying various educational paradigms and started advocating for changes based on what he learned. He did an internship with the Boys and Girls club, where he found out about Future Focused Education and met folks who encouraged him to apply to the X3 internship at Future Focused that summer.
At Future Focused, Cruz learned more about the push for work-based learning, capstones, and graduate profiles happening across New Mexico and quickly became convinced of the efficacy of these programs. He loved being an X3 intern.

Cruz meeting New Mexico House Speaker Javier Martínez.
The X3 Internship Program
X3 is a paid internship for high school and early college-age students that pairs interns with local employers to build homegrown talent. The interns are embedded with local employers, learning essential skills and building a stronger workforce pipeline. Interns also earn a stipend that respects their time and contributes to their family, replacing minimum wage jobs that offer little learning with rich work experiences that build resumes. X3 builds professional connections that transform into new career paths—ensuring historically underserved students receive the mentorship and opportunities they deserve.
X3 works with schools in historically underserved communities, opening doors to future careers and higher education for marginalized youth. Unlike other internships, the employer is fully supported by the X3 team, and all experiences are customized to fit each organization’s needs.
“Future Focused really puts the interns first and cares about their well-being,” explains Cruz. “They care how interns are doing in life and how they're doing at home along with at the workplace."
Cruz appreciated the flexibility that the X3 internship offered him as he was helping to care for his sick grandmother. “I would not get that same kind of treatment in fast food or retail,” he says.
The more internship experience Cruz got, the more invested he became in his education and in changing the education system overall. He says that the internship gave him and many of his peers a reason to care about school. The pay helps students who otherwise might need to be working a part time job, but according to Cruz, what’s even more important is that the experience “allows for students to get that spark in their life, to have something that they can actually use to help them push forward.”

Cruz and Future Focused Education's Lisa Martinez, looking over policy documents.
Cruz is now a student in the capstone course he helped to create. His project is about graduate profiles and he hopes to get one in place at Highland before he graduates. He wants to give more students the same experiences he got and says that going to his capstone class is always the highlight of his day.
“It always makes me feel warm if I’m having a bad day. Students just have a light in their eyes. It's honestly so warming seeing how passionate students can be about something that they got to choose.”
Even though Cruz isn’t going to go into education, his internship experience helped him find that spark and make connections. He says he used to want to be a mechanical engineer, but the educational work showed him that he doesn’t “just want to build things,” but wants to make sure that the things he builds “help the environment and everyone.” “Plus,” he says, “I still want to be involved in education—I still want to be able to be an educational activist and organizer.”
“It always makes me feel warm if I’m having a bad day. Students just have a light in their eyes. It's honestly so warming seeing how passionate students can be about something that they got to choose.” - Cruz Rivas
More Funding for Work-based Learning
Instituto del Puente at Future Focused Education put a series of workshops together with the goal of proposing legislation that would help solve various challenges facing education in New Mexico. The work that Cruz has been doing recently has involved his participation in a focus group that explores work-based learning offerings and funding challenges. Cruz along with other students, administrators, and representatives from various districts and charter schools found that the biggest gap is funding for paid internships. Schools rely on a mix of non-recurring grants and employer contributions, but recurring state funding for internships is lacking.
Relevant, paid work experience was a solution to Cruz’s disengagement and has been for many others like him. While schools are reorganizing to provide the necessary preparation to place young people in internships, the funding for those experiences is not sustainable. We need to find a dedicated revenue source that leverages state, employer, and philanthropic funding in order to keep young people engaged in their education.
Check out Instituto del Puente for more information on Future Focused’s 2025 policy priorities.