With a new $3 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Wai'anae High School Searider Productions digital media program will see dramatic expansion in the next three years, doubling the number of students it hopes to reach and expanding to the Nanakuli community as well as other schools along the Wai'anae Coast.

Currently about 300 students a year are touched by some part of the Searider Productions family, but that should increase to 600 or more.

"It will help build the elementary school programs," said Wai'anae High video teacher Candy Suiso, executive director for Searider Productions.

"We want to give them equipment, cameras, computers."

As well, the Digital Media Halau, as the new program is being called, will see expansion of the mentoring program. As older students help younger ones learn, digital media production will expand to more and more schools on O'ahu's Leeward Coast, which is already a hotbed of digital artistry with students gaining skills for everything from animating movies and shooting documentaries to creating video games.

The grant involves a community partnership that includes 'Olelo public access television facilities, Searider Productions, Sea of Dreams (which works with physically challenged children), all of the Leeward Coast schools, Hawai'i Community Links (which will handle management) and even Leeward Community College and the University of Hawai'i.

The idea is to create a continuum of training for Wai'anae students starting in the elementary grades, going through intermediate and high school and on into college with young people being trained in more and more advanced methodologies.

'Olelo trained about 30 to 40 students from Leeward schools this summer and, in turn, they will go back to their schools and mentor more students.

Along with the rapid expansion over the next few years, Suiso sees the grant enabling Wai'anae High to "spin off" a for-profit production company to handle the ever-increasing requests for their services from the community at large. Once that becomes operational, it will help bring more money to support the programs and continue to help send even more students on to college.

"This way we won't have to take as much from the school," Suiso said. "With these kids now, we're helping them to go to college, and they just want to come back and give back. And that makes our program stronger. But we want to make it even bigger. ... It's just going to make the state of Hawai'i even stronger in media arts.

"This idea we have on the Leeward Coast, we want to have it for the whole state. These kids are learning a skill that they're good at and they're going to come back and build an industry in Wai'anae."

Eighteen-year-old Kainoa Aila is one of those students.

A 2006 graduate of Wai'anae High, he hopes to turn his interest in digital media into a career by studying further at Leeward Community College starting Aug. 21.

It all began at Wai'anae Intermediate, Aila said, and continued through his high school years.

"Back in seventh and eighth grade, I didn't want to do the motion thing, so I did the video side because I like playing video games," he said. "I was raised on a farm and I just liked doing something different, so I learned all this technology. It was different from digging holes and watering plants."

Aila dreams, 10 years from now, of being a member of the technology team that puts together movies like the new "Superman," His interest is mostly in motion graphics, which he describes as "a lot of movement and words."

"You're watching something very high-paced," he said.

But he also wants to be creating that kind of an industry in Hawai'i.

"After I learn everything there is to learn, I'm pretty sure I want to come back and give back to my community," Aila said. "What I've learned at Searider Productions is what you would learn at a college level. And it's free. In our class, we have different projects, and it's up to you what you want to do."

As the grant is launched, it will be managed by a new organization called Community Links Hawai'i, formed a year ago to help manage grants for creative groups such as Searider Productions.

"They need the assistance with the fiscal sponsorship but also managing the funds," said Community Links president Kathy Matayoshi, former Commerce and Consumer Affairs director under former Gov. Ben Cayetano and most recently chief of staff at the Board of Water Supply.

"We'll step in and work with them on administration so Candy and her staff can focus on the kids," Matayoshi said. "One of the things they're trying to do is encourage them into higher education. It's a feeder into a feeder into a feeder. And it's starting and building right from Wai'anae."

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com.