WRESA 2018: Western Region Education Service Alliance

WRESA 2018: Western Region Education Service Alliance

2018 Summer Leadership Conference

Hey, North Carolina! Who is attending to 2018 Summer Leadership Conference in Asheville, NC on June 24th? Look out for the eScholar booth because we will be attending too. This year’s theme is “Developing a School Culture That Thrives.”

eScholar and Cumberland County Schools will be presenting a session on, “Using Data to Create a School Culture of Collaboration and Personalized Education”. This session will explain how using data and turning insights into action should be a continuous and collaborative process that all staff and administrators can buy into. This session will also take the attendee through Cumberland County Schools’ (CCS) journey of using data to collaborate and personalize education for their students. Attendees will learn how CCS collects and integrates their data, how they’ve created a culture of collaboration around quantitative and qualitative data, and how they use data to ensure that their students can have a personalized education. Our session day and time is TBD! Check back for more updates!

What is the Western Region Education Service Alliance (WRESA)?

The concept of collaborative began in the 1970s and has evolved from the Western Regional Education Center (WREC) to to what it is today, the Western Region Education Service Alliance (WRESA). WRESA is a collaborative that was created by WNC school systems in 1996-1997 under the direction of Dr. Roger Metcalf. Since 1998, all of the 18 school systems in Western North Carolina have been members of WRESA. In 2007, Dr. Jan Webster joined WRESA as the secondary coordinator and in 2008 was hired as the director.

Their purpose is to increase school systems’ effectiveness through sharing instructional strategies and best practices while also pooling resources to provide high level professional development for educators in Western North Carolina. This collaborative approach has served their western systems well over the last 18 years through providing support, sharing best practices, sharing resources, offering high-quality professional development and saving financial resources. The WRESA staff teaches many sessions on site and they also travel to schools or regional locations to conduct sessions. Through their collaborative efforts, WRESA has been able to bring numerous national and international educational presenters to Western North Carolina. This practice allows regional educators opportunities to receive high quality instruction while saving our school systems expenses related to travel. WRESA provides coordination of job-alike groups such as curriculum staff and human resource officers along with others.