Thomas Myers and I had met when he was involved with La Plaza Telecommunity in the 1990's. We met again for lunch where he described his work with teenagers in Taos. The Taos Teen Network team formed with students and staff a Chamisa Mesa High School, a private school where Myers teaches computer and video skills as well as digital storytelling. The group set up a local web site that included community information, a calendar, youth sponsored and supported projects, and a listing of health, legal, and support pages. They set up a mailing list, which now has sixty subscribers representing most of the national and local organizations that deal with young people in the Taos area. Over a ten-month period there were almost 2000 visitors, which may not seem like a lot for the effort expended, but web resources should be considered as a supplement for other methods of informing people and not the main source. The web site makes use of a variety of display technologies whose complexities indicate the students working on this pushed their own learning much further than My First Web Page exercises. The web site credits show the division of labor in design, information collection, and implementation--strong evidence of a sustained team effort. Having faculty involved with the project helped avoid some of the problems other MIRA teams had in other states where there was a problem coordinating MIRA project activities with a high school class agenda. Myers also taught digital storytelling which was a direct outcome of the MIRA training. From their first exposure to the training in California, Myers and others have used the techniques in their work. At Chamisa High School they have upgraded their lab to included DS tools and software so that "every student at Chamisa Mesa learns digital story telling."

For a town of this size, there seemed to be a healthy number of organizations working with teens or trying to provide more options for expression, problem solving, or learning. The ones I spoke with saw the teen network mailing list as a place for announcements rather than discussion. I have found that once a mailing list is perceived as a bulletin board rather than a forum for discourse it remains just that. The discussions take place at various meetings and events where the adults convene. An ad hoc group with a grant from the New Mexico Department of Health is comprised of teens and a couple of adults. Teen Council is supposed to be planning drug and alcohol free dances. As with other towns, drug use and alcohol abuse are problems in many age groups. However, the spread of the cheap black tar heroin or chiva has been centered in the area just south of Taos. The town of Chimayo had one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the nation, and its availability has spread throughout the whole region.