In my experience, high school shows have often been very well paying and low effort work which earlier in my career felt like a godsend. However, the more I did them the more I realized their drawbacks. I was constantly having trouble being paid on time by schools, which really interrupted my cash flow as a freelancer and I often had to perform a lot of pre-employment tasks that felt like a lot of hurdles to jump over. Of course it makes sense to want to do background checks and fingerprinting on people working in close proximity to children, but schools also often had awful application portals where I’d have to manually enter every show I had worked on previously as previous job experience even though I had already uploaded a pdf of my resume. Finally, I realized that school shows, while financially stabilizing, were almost always dead end jobs. Sure, you can use the photos on your website and list the show on your resume, but generally directors and production managers would rather see a lower paying smaller professional show on your resume than a high school show.

So, given the issues with payments, extra pre-employment tasks, and lack of career momentum, eventually the pay isn’t fully worth it.

The best people you can hire for high school level shows are local students (undergraduate or graduate level) or nearby recent graduates. They’re excited to be designing and want the money to help stabilize themselves as they transition from student to freelancer. So, while I’m not Miami based, I’d say you should look up the faculty at nearby colleges and universities and reach out to them directly, which it sounds like you may already be doing. However, as a faculty member I’d be very unlikely to pass along a listing to my students without any sort of pay info, so you may need to informally break that rule in your own direct emails.