We sat down with Adam Whalen and Misty Wharton, two Oregon educational leaders who recently joined our organization, to reimagine how schools and employers prepare students for a future they’re excited about — one that’s resilient and provides a living wage. 

Question: Misty was most recently the superintendent in Nestucca Valley School District. She joined Northwest Regional this past fall to expand career learning opportunities across the region, particularly for those without much historical access. Misty, what are you most excited about in your new role?

Misty: What always excites me is creating opportunities for kids. In this role, I get to continue to work with the peers and professionals I’ve worked with for years in this area of northwest Oregon. 

We all share a common vision of trying to improve pathways for students into the workforce. And this is something we’ve been talking about really seriously for the past two years. 

Coming on board and having Adam Whalen alongside me is really bringing energy to this work. He was doing fabulous work at Willamette ESD, so there is a synergy and an excitement right now from the superintendent level on down to push this vision forward. So I’m excited to push.  

Question: Adam, what drew you to apply to become our first-ever executive director of school performance and workforce development? 

Adam: During my nine years at Willamette ESD, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Northwest Regional Education Service District on many projects. I also got to know the executive leadership team. 

Having built what was then a small program called Willamette Promise (the program helps students earn dual credits) into an initiative that now operates across six education service districts, I had the luxury of spending a lot of time working with schools in the northwest region. 

The thing that I have appreciated the most is that it really is the most complex ESD in the state in terms of geography and the demographics of the kids we serve here. 

It just seemed like a really unique opportunity and challenge to bring some of the work I was doing down in the Willamette region up to northwest Oregon. I’m really excited to be here. 

Question: When you think about preparing today’s kids for their future careers, what do you find most inspiring?

Misty: I find kids inspiring. Time and time again whatever challenge is placed in front of them, they generally exceed that. I feel that we as a public institution need to do a better job at challenging them more in terms of workforce and career pathways. 

They are eager for that type of learning. We all sat in classrooms and said things like: “Well, how are we going to use this in real life?” 

The great thing about many of the programs in these pathways is that it’s hands-on experience, it’s real-life experience. They can see first-hand how they will use that. And that creates a greater investment on their part in their own education. It’s a greater return on investment for everyone involved, including the future employers.  

Adam: Kids are really smart. Kids think differently than we do as adults. I remember one day in particular when I was walking the halls of the Willamette Career Academy. One of our most popular programs down there at that school was our cosmetology program. And as an adult I made an assumption that any kid who signs up and participates in the cosmetology program, they must have a dream of being an esthetician or a barber. I remember asking a student once, “what’s your goal here?” 

And they answered me so confidently and said, “I’m going to be a nurse, and I’m going to cut hair and it’s going to pay for nursing school.”

And I thought, “that is brilliant, and you are four steps ahead of me when I was your age.”

They think differently. They think of things in terms of careers and side hustles and gigs. It’s a different world of work than what we grew up in and experienced as youth. 

The mindsets that kids have now. They think really critically about what they want to achieve and how those achievements are going to help them reach their bigger dreams later in life. I find that inspiring too. They are so smart, and they deserve the best.

Misty: I’d also like to say that having lived my entire life in a rural community, so often kids who grow up in a region like that, their exposure to different careers and resources and opportunities is limited. Even with the advent of the internet and being connected with the worldwide web, if they don’t see a professional in front of them, it doesn’t even ping on their radar that this might be a pathway for them. 

So a regional approach to this work brings urban and rural together and increases opportunities for all the kids. 

If they don’t want to be a teacher or a firefighter — or whatever else they see within their community — they deserve to know there are other possibilities out there they can walk toward. 

Question: Why do students need career and college readiness opportunities? 

Misty: To broaden their view of the world, to set them up for success in the workforce and to improve our future employees for our workforce. 

This is a symbiotic relationship that directly feeds the workforce that we all need as Oregonians. We need qualified employees and by partnering with employers to establish what those needs are, we are benefiting the kids because we are preparing them first-hand for that specific role. 

Adam: Experience matters. Experiential learning is really important. And that self-assessment piece of having exposure and experiences at a really young age is critically important. 

If you think you want to be a phlebotomist, but then you get to a job site and see blood drawn and you faint, I think that is a really valuable lesson to learn as a 16-year-old and not as a 22-year-old who just completed a phlebotomy program. 

The self-assessment piece is critical. It’s as much about kids finding their pathway and how they fit and how their talents can apply to that field or job. But also figuring out what’s not for them. 

We need to teach kids that a little bit sooner and the way we can do that is by providing real, tangible, real-life experiences while they are still in high school.
 
Misty: Yes. Sometimes knowing what you want to do is knowing what you don’t want to do. 

Adam Whalen (red helmet in the back row) attended an immersive, 24-hour event with Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue in October 2025. The event taught him how to suit up like an emergency responder, use the jaws of life to pry open a car, attach a hose to a fire hydrant and use a crowbar to force open a door. He gained a first-hand look at the skills and training needed to work as a firefighter or first responder. Photo courtesy of Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue.

Question: Are there any students in particular who benefit from these opportunities? 

Misty: I think often the kids who benefit from an experience like this are those who haven’t found their niche in what you would perceive as your general education pathway in high school. These types of opportunities (think rebuilding a car engine in a mechanics class, writing code to 3-D print a video game character or learning how to use an industrial stove) are what those types of students need the most in order to stay engaged. 

And more and more of our students are leaning that direction. 

They are questioning is college right for me? Well, let’s try some of these other experiences to see if that’s truly right before they commit to that pathway. 

I feel it engages a different group of kids than it is probably perceived to engage. It might be my bias, but I feel the general public might assume that students earning As and other top marks are the ones who are going to thrive in these types of programs because they’ve figured out how to play the game of public education, but it’s often those who struggle academically. The reason they struggle is because they are not engaged in that work. 

If they want to be a mechanic and you put them in a room with a car, and they are starting to learn those skills, they will be engaged. 

Adam: I do want to talk about how we conceive of career and technical education (CTE), who it’s for and who benefits from it. 

I think there is a potentially outdated narrative in Oregon that career and college readiness is shop class, it’s manufacturing. 

I think what we miss is that we’re talking about future health care professionals, we’re talking about dentists, the next generation that is going to build the infrastructure of our nation. 

For me there isn’t a particular kid.  

Our goal should be that all kids are career ready and some kids go to college first to become career ready, but career and technical education is for everyone. 

CTE is for every kid regardless of zip code, regardless of what language they speak at home. 

To me, as adults, we need to do a lot of reflection and a lot of re-education on what career and technical education actually means. 

Question: Why is this notion persisting? 

Adam: It’s just a 20th century notion. 

Misty: It’s what we had when we were kids. 

Adam: If you look at the career clusters we are talking about. We’re talking behavioral health that can span many ages and sectors. We’re talking about kids in spaces who are going to be of service to other people when they grow up. 

As the national career cluster framework has modernized (it was updated in 2024), it’s up to us as Oregonians to learn a little bit more and update our own definitions that we use of what CTE is. 

Misty: As an agency, the ESD is poised to look to the future of this work because so often school administrators want to do this but don’t have the capacity. Whether it’s a lack of time or a lack of their own agency to be able to do that work. 

We sit in the unique position to look at all of our school districts and look at all of our partners and be that bridge between those two worlds. We are trying to push the work forward for future generations versus dealing with the models of the past of public education. 

Our ability to take a regional approach creates a really unique opportunity for us to change the language and way we talk about this work. 

It’s pretty important, and it’s imperative.  

Adam: This is when I get on my ESD train. One thing that’s really important to note about what Misty is saying is that I’ve heard the bridge from K-12 to career or the bridge from K-12 to college is like a cliff the student has to jump from. Hopefully they make it, and hopefully they don’t go right down to the bottom.

Our ultimate goal as an ESD is that we can really be in that gap. If you are jumping from one cliff to the next, and we don’t want kids to fall down, there needs to be other systems and mechanisms at play during that transition. 

I really believe ultimately in the power of the ESD to be nimble and to be innovative and to be in those spaces that Misty just described. 

We are not bound by the same systems that our K-12 partners are. We’re not bound by the same systems that our higher education partners are. We have the really unique ability to be nimble and flexible for kids and to be in spaces to help ensure a seamless transition for our kids. 

Misty: And meet every one of our school districts where they are because they are each in a different place. To be able to scale whatever it is they are doing and support them and work alongside them, meeting their needs as we all go along, that is important.  

Adam: I will say I don’t always love the cliff analogy. But if we continue with it, maybe we don’t actually close the gap between the cliffs, but maybe we give kids the chance to learn how to jump earlier or remove walls and build a chain link instead so they can see where they are headed. 

That’s the power of the ESD. In statute, we are charged with being in service to our districts. That’s where we come in. There’s a gap in the curriculum in the programs they offer in high school and the programs and offerings they have in higher education. We won’t be able to provide the whole package that our partners need. 

So what are the gaps and how can the ESD fill those gaps by bringing new and novel opportunities to kids? 

Misty: And how can we engage private entities in that work? Which is something we have not done enough in our state. 

Adam: Part of the special sauce I think that ESDs have is that when we are engaging with business and industry, we can provide a single point of contact for our business partners. 

Generally there is policy, there’s a process with how a business can engage the K-12 community. In a region like NWRESD, if a business wanted to work with the entire region, they could do that individually by school, but that would be taxing and cumbersome. 

Whereas if they partner with the ESD, in turn, they get to collaborate with 20 school districts. I think the ESD is really uniquely positioned to be an intermediary for both business and our K-12 partners to design systems so that these entities can really effectively collaborate . 

Question: What would it look like to be doing this world perfectly in your opinion? 

Misty: Every kid regardless of where they live has access to and understands how to navigate a pathway toward either a career that they want to pursue or college that they want to enroll in. 

Gone is the confusion around the whole process, and there is a direct link between that student and their school through the ESD to the private entity, whether it’s Caterpillar, Intel, Nike. We work as the communication liaison between the public schools and these private entities to put systems in place to get kids experience and jobs if that’s the pathway they wish to take. 

Question: So a kid would not say, ‘What do I want to do,’ but rather, ‘What I’ve learned in high school is what I want to do and how to make that happen.’ 

Misty: Yes. They’d say: In 6th-8th grade, I learned about all these possibilities that are out there, and as a ninth grader I’ve decided I want to try this. I didn’t like it. 

So then as an 11th grader I tried something else. I love it. This is what I want to do going into the future. And how did I do that? I worked with my career guidance counselor at my high school, my high school principal, the career and technical education coordinator of the region and Northwest Regional Education Service District’s career connected learning workforce development department that tied us into for example Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue. 

Question: So they were connected to an actual opportunity? 

Misty: Yes. 

Question: Are you talking about all 100,000 kids in this region? That is quite a massive undertaking.

Misty: Yes, we focus on the middle and high schoolers, but exposing kids to opportunities in younger grades, too, so they start to become familiar with the vocabulary around workforce development and career technical education. 

So some of the things the career and college readiness team has created are career kits, so they start talking about what a career is at a much younger age. They do a hands-on activity to highlight what that career might be like. 

So starting that dialogue long before they even enter middle school. 

Question: What do you say to people who might say ‘well, let them be kids. Let them go to school and read books and not think about adult things.’

Adam: I think kids would strongly reject that mindset. 

Misty: They want to be treated with independence and autonomy. 

Adam: And relevance. If you look up the stats about students who take career and technical education courses, you see that 97.7%% of students who take at least 2 CTE credits graduate. This type of learning is highly correlated with being more engaged in school and being more likely to graduate from high school.  

Why they do that is because school becomes relevant. School is not just coming to class. Reading a book. School is relevant and it’s a means to an end and that I think is really important too. 

Question: What will our process of embarking on this work look like?

Adam: One really important part of the work that we’re doing to establish the foundational planning is working with superintendents and school districts to look at economic data in all of the regions. 

The ultimate goal is or should be that every student in our system graduates with a pathway to a living wage. Sometimes that requires more education. Sometimes that requires a certification program. But school districts alongside NWRESD really need to do some reflection and that’s what we’re doing now on:

• Where is the economy going in each of our counties — Clatsop, Columbia, Tillamook and Washington?
• What's the future of job growth?
• What are the career sectors that really matter and are meaningful?

As part of the process, we don’t put our own values on it and say: this is what’s important to us and kids should do it. We really listen to students, we’re including student voice, but a really big part of it is to actually look at the economic data of our region and look at:

• What are the needs and where’s the future job growth? 

Misty: At the school district level, examining the economic data and having these conversations is a model where you are looking to the future. You’re not just continuing to repeat the practices of the past. 

It starts a really, really important discussion among superintendents about yes, welding is important and we’ve had it for 20 years. But what does a welding profession look like for our kids in the next 10 years of economic data? 

In this case, this is a really relevant field. 

But are there programs out there that aren’t going to meet our needs in the future? 

So let’s talk about our future and how we are going to have to reshape what we’re offering to kids in order to do that. I’ve been super pleased with our superintendents’ discussions around this and their eagerness and excitement about looking to the future and how they can bring new opportunities into their communities. 

And so those have been really rewarding conversations to have with the superintendents in our region. They’re all working very collaboratively toward the same goal, which is increasing opportunities for all the kids. 

It’s not a one size fits all. We’re going to have to be nimble in these practices to meet the districts where they are. 

We are also going to have to try some things and fail at it in order to see what works best for the kids, the educators and the private industry. The willingness and excitement of everyone coming to the table is there, which means we are ready to go. And I’m excited about that. 

Question: After your many years of work, does the energy feel different now?

Misty: Yes. They are engaged. They see that we are starting to create a pathway forward through the work.   

Question: Can you talk about the visioning work you’ve been doing recently with school leaders? 

Misty: The superintendents have been working pretty hard over the past few months. Everyone is attaining the same basic understanding of this work. We’re at a stage now where we are looking to the future and offering what things could look like in the world of job shadowing, internships, guest speakers and industry-recognized credentials. 

That’s the future of what we are driving toward. 

We are essentially inventorying each district’s needs in those areas, the opportunities that they see that may be available, and identifying barriers they feel might exist to those things for the students. 

Adam: Misty talked about the portfolio — essentially the inventory we are doing. 

One of the most promising practices that we are exploring is that there are a number of certification opportunities for kids to get certified in the health care space, in manufacturing, in welding, in hospitality management. 

It is kind of like the wild west of pathways. I think we are really working hard to look at who are the people in the organizations that we can partner with to offer workforce certifications and what would it look like for the ESD to be really involved and to be that conduit of offering a menu of workforce certifications with us being the primary partners to access the districts. 

Two really promising pilots that we’re launching are:

1. A commercial driver’s license program that we are launching for the Class of 2026 in partnership with Elite trucking. We partner with Elite Trucking. Elite holds the ability and accreditation to offer the certification. We serve as the K-12 intermediary to advertise the opportunity, to recruit students, to create a pathway ultimately that leads to them getting a class-C driver’s license.  
2. Another emerging partnership that we are working on in the certification space is a partnership with Linguava that offers an Oregon Health Authority-approved health care interpretation credential. We’re going to create a pilot for the Class of 2026 also to potentially recruit a cohort that will be certified by Oregon Health Authority to do medical interpretation and translation. 

Us really leaning into partnerships is going to be a critical piece of this work not only with business and industry but also with training and certification providers so that students don’t have to do all that research and all that shopping. The ESD can work collaboratively with our partners to build really cohesive systems to advertise different certification systems to students prior to even graduating.