Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest supports the rural Lower Kuskokwim School District to improve teacher working conditions and teacher retention. To achieve this goal, REL and district partners review evidence-based practices and tools and develop plans for implementing evidence-based strategies to address working conditions and teacher retention as well as examines associated outcomes. Through this work, the partnership is also developing and disseminating a user-friendly tool to help rural districts document, test, and refine strategies to improve working conditions and teacher retention. The tool will be shared nationally through conference presentations, the REL website, and social media to extend the impact beyond LKSD.
Partnership organization: Lower Kuskokwim School District (Alaska)
Completed Projects
For the Lower Kuskokwim Teacher Recruitment and Retention project in 2024-25 project, REL Northwest and multiple Alaska rural school districts collaborated to create a Guide to Developing Localized Strategies to Address Rural Teacher Working Conditions. The guide will help rural districts use research and data to identify and implement localized strategies to improve teacher working conditions and, ultimately, teacher retention.
REL Northwest is helping Lower Kuskokwim School District use research and evidence to inform decisions and actions to strengthen teacher working conditions with the goal of improving retention. Through this technical support project, Lower Kuskokwim developed an understanding of the research on teacher working conditions and developed tools to assess and monitor data to inform their teacher retention efforts and human resource decisions.
Related Work
REL Northwest developed Retaining Rural Teachers by Addressing Working Conditions: A Guide to Develop and Test Localized Strategies (REL 2026-017) to give rural district leaders a practical, research-based process for tackling the challenge of teacher retention, particularly in rural or remote schools.
To help districts improve working conditions, the Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest (REL Northwest) developed a Working Conditions Survey Question Bank as part of the Alaska Improving Teacher Retention and Recruitment in Rural Schools partnership with the Lower Kuskokwim School District. The question bank is part of a broader rural teacher recruitment and retention toolkit, designed to help district teams assess and address the conditions that influence whether teachers stay.
This blog introduces a new Regional Educational Laboratory Northwest guide that helps school and district teams improve teacher retention by strengthening working conditions. The guide shows how to use research and local data to select and adapt practical, testable strategies for rural and other education settings.