The plan was adopted in the superintendent's first year. Community sessions, a steering committee, a graduate profile, a printed booklet with everyone's photo on the back. Five years, five goals.
She leaves in year three. The board runs a search, the new superintendent starts in July, and by November there's a listening tour and the first draft of a new plan.
What happened to the old one? Half of it was working. Nobody can say which half.
Notice what was actually lost. Not the booklet. Three years of decisions were made against those goals: schedules built, positions created, money moved. The district now has no way to show the new leader, the board, or the community where that work stood on the day the leadership changed.
A plan that lives in a cabinet's shared drive leaves with the cabinet. A plan the community has been watching has witnesses: board members who followed it, principals whose work was named in it, families who saw the same numbers you did. That isn't sentiment. It's the difference between starting from where the district is and starting over.
If your plan can't survive a superintendent search, it isn't a five-year plan; it's merely intention.