About Eagle Nest Enterprises
Eagle Nest Enterprises was founded in 2020 during the height of the dumpster fire now known as Covid to serve high school students who no longer had access to in person learning. Since our founding, our mission broadened to include working with students of all ages from 13 to 88. What started as a laid-off high school teacher finishing off a class of seniors using 30 year-old home welding equipment evolved. With the help of industry sponsors and trade union support, we had the newest electronic inverter machine technology, cutting edge CNC equipment and a full time welding program based out of a commercial aircraft hangar. But it was not to last. Thanks to the leaders of the Oregon Higher Education Commission, they determined that Eagle Nest Enterprises was illegally teaching people career enhancing skills. The gestapo state wants control of all educational activities leading their citizens to more productive incomes! They fined us $500 for being an unlicensed career school, despite us functioning clearly under the applicable exemptions granted by law in ORS 345.015. But we appealed as the law allowed, and they didn’t like that. The corrupt director of the HECC then hit us with $750 in fines and revised their charges to five counts of running a career school, and demanded fourteen pages of discovery data, including all of our student data, taxes, personal bank records and more. Nope, not gonna happen. We ended up paying a fine that they spent over $14,000 of your Oregon tax payer money to collect, and declared victory over the evil unlicensed truck school.
Our new passion is to bring attention to an out of control government agency led by a director named Kia,
Our Lead Instructor
Lead instructor David Richards has over twenty years of teaching experience working with high school students and adults. A graduate of the University of Wyoming for his bachelors in Technology Education, he finished a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instructional Design in 2023. When not teaching students how to melt metal, he can be found fabricating all kinds of products for fun. Past projects have included his last two houses, aircraft hangars, airplanes, hovercrafts, restoring jeeps, and anything else he can get his hands on.
Administration
Bookkeeper and scheduler Caroline Richards’s main challenge is to keep David focused. After running an in home daycare for the last fifteen years, she has taken on business management of Eagle Nest Enterprises. She is also the resident CNC plasma cutter expert and will be branching out into design.
Why we are different
We are different from community colleges and trade schools. Our class sizes are deliberately limited to no more than five people to assure that each student has their own dedicated machine with no waiting lines. Keeping numbers down also assures maximum instructor access. Yes, we could add more people and run bigger, but that would compromise our mission. We don’t have to, so we won’t.
We taught all common commercial welding processes, with a mix of machines from vintage transformers to cutting edge digital pulse capable inverters. Nobody had nicer equipment than we invested in, and it was all included in the welding experience. Thank you to Kia Sorrenson of the HECC of the State of Oregon for doing what government does best- ruining things with overregulation.