The Northwest Regional Education Service District is the largest of Oregon’s 19 education service districts. NWRESD works with school districts in the four counties it serves to deliver quality, cost-effective programs and services, including special education, technology, professional development and school improvement.

NWRESD was selected as a 2019 Spotlight honoree because of its efforts to enhance interagency collaboration to make measurable improvement on a state-level education policy priority. Specifically, NWRESD collaborated with its schools to establish a common improvement aim, analyze underlying causes of low success rates, and devise interventions intended to advance more equitable 9th-grade classroom performance and eventual high school graduation. NWRESD developed an infrastructure that enabled coordination of school improvement teams and their leaders; social connections and relational trust in and among teams spanning multiple districts; data systems to provide both quantitative and qualitative evidence of students’ educational experience and outcomes; and the common use of a standard set of on-track measures to assess progress.