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Published on 11/27/1995 All articles from this issue

County ed board approves plan to improve relations with local districts

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Town Crier Staff ReportThe Santa Clara County Office of Education has approved its Commitment 2000 Long-Range Plan.

The plan, which has been in the works since fall 1994, was approved at the Oct. 18 board meeting.

The first big step towards the creation of the plan came in December 1994 when a group of parents, business and community leaders, district superintendents and county office staff members got together to answer the questions, "What should the County Office of Education be, ideally, and how can it serve and support the school districts of Santa Clara County. How it can support the school districts of Santa Clara County and by extension support the education of children throughout the county. What should be its mission?"

"The meetings were structured so there were a lot of small group activities to facilitate dialogue among the different parties and to really work toward the end product," said Andrea Leiderman, president of the county school board and representative of Area 1, which includes the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District, and the Mountain View Elementary District. "That was a very fundamental part of the process."

At the meeting, the group agreed on a mission statement: to become "a champion for public education, serving as an exemplary regional resource to students, parents, districts, agencies and businesses."

The December coalition also hammered out six goals that would help the organization. The goals were listed in the county office's "Contact" staff newsletter:

1) To turn relations with school districts and school boards into collaborations and to use those collaborations to influence both political and social support for all learners in Santa Clara County.

2) To become an organization whose strength comes from the diversity and commonalty of both its clients and its workers; to accept, appreciate and capitalize on the differences and similarities of the community in which they serve.

3) To champion the cause of educational reform throughout Santa Clara County; to model innovative practices in its own programs and offer targeted, systemic support to school districts in their efforts to restructure.

4) To create a team that understands its mission, has the tools to work toward it and possesses the commitment to achieve it; to become a community of learners skilled at supporting one another.

5) To become the focal point of technologies that support learning and the business of public education; to provide a full range of services, offering all districts, from the least sophisticated to the most, the assistance they need.

6) To achieve 100 percent satisfaction among all County Office of Education clients; and to provide high quality high need services at the lowest possible cost.

Since last year's meeting, 26 objectives have been created to help reach these goals.

To make sure the goals stay on target with the needs of an ever changing world, every six months, the plan will be looked over to see where it stands in development, and whether future objectives are still necessary or new ones need to be created.In anticipation of having a finalized plan, state-funded money had been set aside. In the first year of the Commitment 2000 Long Range Plan, it will require $345,000 to implement, with another $635, 000 needed for the second and third years. According to Jan Chaney, the executive director of communications for the Santa Clara County of Education, the money will be primarily used for improving technology within the system and for training.

"It was certainly a collective effort," Carey said. However, she said a big reason for the Commitment 2000 goals becoming more of a reality is the dedication of County Superintendent of Schools Colleen B. Wilcox, who has been on Board less than two years. "She has been a driving force in making this happen," she said.

The Santa Clara County Office of Education is an educational service agency that provides special, alternative, and supplemental instructional programs and assists local school districts and the California State Department of Education. It does this through teacher training and consultation. It provides schooling for students with special needs, like learning disabilities and "at-risk" qualities. It is also required to monitor the school district budgets.

Since it serves six different counties, the bulk being Santa Clara County, the implementation of this plan will affect a large number of schools, their staff and students.

Marge Gratiot, superintendent of the Los Altos Elementary School District, said she has seen the county office's plans and thinks reaching the goals is a reasonable task.

"I think the new county superintendent Colleen Wilcox really is committed to having the County office provide good service to school districts and there's also some new county school board members committed to it," she said. "I've really seen a change in the last year in a positive direction. They've really improved their service to the districts."

"It's exactly what the board needed," Leiderman said. "We needed to look at the organization long term, and define the issues we wanted to address, and we needed to do that in a way that was inclusive of the opinions and inputs of all the different folks involved, both internally and externally. I think it was a great process."