Goals Planned for Schools Through 2000 : Education: A retreat by Glendale educators and parents produces a broad framework for innovative changes.

A planning retreat last week by Glendale teachers, parents and school administrators outlined broad goals for local education through the year 2000, completing the next step in a plan to change the way Glendale schools are run, officials said.

The three-day retreat, which ended Saturday, was part of “Glendale Schools 2000,” a year of strategic planning that administrators expect will bring about innovative changes during the next decade and give more decision-making authority and flexibility to teachers and school sites.

District officials conceded that the results of the retreat were largely abstract: The 30 participants developed a “mission statement,” 15 strategies for accomplishing the mission and a wish-list of objectives, such as “All students in the Glendale Unified School District will achieve at their optimal potential each day.”

The district’s mission, according to participants, “is to ensure that all students acquire the character and capability to excel in the endeavors of their choice, through our multicultural, technological, performance-paced, self-directed network, that fully integrates all school, family and community resources.”

The strategies were developed into statements such as “We will integrate community resources into the instructional programs” and “We will guarantee that the special needs of all students are met in order to guarantee access to all aspects of the curriculum.”

Officials said such statements are meant to guide the district as it develops more specific plans for its schools. The statements also are expected to provide themes for individual schools as they eventually are allowed more say in how they are run.

“They are rather broad, but there are things here that really chart a direction as to what we should do,” said Don Empey, the district’s assistant superintendent of instruction. “Now that we have a framework for planning, it will get very specific from here on in.”

The retreat, held at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona at a cost of about $6,000, was led by Bill Cook of the Cambridge Management Group, an Alabama-based planning and consulting business, officials said.

The district is paying Cook about $20,000 to conduct strategic planning through April. The process began in May, when nearly 250 administrators, teachers, parents, students and community and City Hall leaders met for two days to brainstorm and discuss schools’ priorities for the next decade.

Thirty of those participants volunteered to attend the retreat. District officials will attempt by October to recruit up to 300 people to serve on 15 “action teams,” which will work on specific plans for each strategy developed by the task force, Empey said. Those plans will include estimates of how much money and time each strategy might take, he said.

The teams are expected to report in February to the 30-member task force, which in turn will present a comprehensive plan in April to the Board of Education, Empey said.

Each of Glendale’s 27 schools, keeping the district’s general strategies in mind, will then develop its own specific plans. Administrators have compared that step to school-based management, a process now under way in some Los Angeles schools that allows teachers, parents and administrators at individual school sites more say in how their schools are run.

“How school ‘A’ designs its strategies and action plans . . . may differ from how school ‘B’ does it, but the intent will be for both schools to fulfill the mission of the district,” Supt. Robert Sanchis said. “This creates latitude and flexibility” in planning, he said.

The process might not be easy. Abstract goals were set by the district in the early 1970s, but Glendale schools--and their needs--have changed. The district is now ethnically diverse, with about 66% of its students coming from Middle Eastern and nonwhite backgrounds. The Board of Education has approved year-round education, to begin in certain schools in 1991.

Because of an influx of immigrants and a development boom in Glendale, student enrollment and its effects have been difficult to predict. So has the availability of state money, which administrators said will be necessary for some of the changes that will be proposed.

But participants in last week’s retreat said they were confident that strategic planning can withstand those challenges.

“This starts to set us in a new direction,” said Brent Noyes, a teacher at Lincoln Elementary School and a former president of the Glendale Teachers Assn. “It gives us a framework and a blueprint for the future.”