Which District Initiatives Survive Your Successor

District initiatives outlast a superintendent only when they stop needing one. Average tenure in the role is 5.4 years, and a five-year strategic plan signed today will be somebody else's document before its final year. What survives is whatever other adults in the building already depend on.

TL;DR: AASA's 2025-26 salary study puts average superintendent tenure at 5.4 years, and its earlier survey found nearly 64 percent of superintendents had held their post fewer than six years. The initiatives that survive a transition share four traits: minutes on a published schedule, a measure the district owns, another subject that depends on them, and no need for a central-office champion. Universal keyboarding in grades K-3 scores well on all four. It will also never carry your name.

The arithmetic behind every five-year plan

Start with the number that decides the rest. AASA's 2025-26 Superintendent Salary and Benefits Study reports average tenure in the current role at 5.4 years, roughly double the three-years-or-less figure that circulated for years, and still short of the pre-pandemic six. AASA's own tenure summary says it more plainly: nearly 64 percent of superintendents in its 2022-23 survey had been in their current position fewer than six years.

Read that against a strategic plan adopted in the fall of 2026 and running to 2031. Years three through five carry the hardest implementation work, and they land in a term you may not be serving. Your successor arrives with their own reading of the community, their own hires, and a real need to show that something changed when they got here.

An initiative that still requires your attention in year four is an initiative you have already scheduled for cancellation.

Why strong programs get sunset and dull ones survive

Survival has little to do with quality. It has to do with whether anyone would notice the absence.

The Penn Center for Learning Analytics examined license use across 48 districts and found a median 70 percent of student software licenses completely unused, with 97.6 percent not used to the level intended. LearnPlatform's 2026 EdTech Top 40 supplies the other half of the picture: districts maintain access to an average of 3,001 unique digital tools, while students and educators each interact with about four.

Those two findings describe the same building. A district holds thousands of tools and uses a handful, which means most initiatives are already finished before anyone votes to end them. Nobody wove them into a schedule, a report card, or another teacher's plan book, so removing them costs a superintendent nothing and returns a line item. That is how a sunset actually works. Not a rejection. A shrug.

An initiative dies quietly when its removal is invisible, and it survives when its absence would break somebody else's Tuesday.

Four questions that predict whether an initiative outlives you

Ask them about anything in the current plan, not only keyboarding.

Boutique programs usually fail the first question and the last one together. They arrive with a champion, they run in a pull-out slot borrowed from somebody, and their evidence lives inside a portal the district loses at renewal. Three yeses out of four is not a near miss either, because the missing one is normally the schedule, and an initiative without minutes is a preference.

Four yeses describes an initiative your successor inherits; three describes a program with a countdown.

The objection I take seriously: keyboarding is too small to be a legacy

A superintendent who wants to be remembered does not get remembered for typing. Legacies in this job are bond referenda, an early-literacy framework, a graduation-rate turnaround, a rebuilt high school. Keyboarding is a rounding error in a general fund and no board names a building after it. That objection is right, and I am not going to argue it away.

What I will argue is that the standards have left this one unclaimed, which is exactly what makes it available. Common Core names the skill at grade 3, where W.3.6 asks students to use technology to produce and publish writing "using keyboarding skills", and attaches nothing measurable to it. The first measurable expectation arrives a year later in W.4.6: type a minimum of one page in a single sitting. Typed state testing commonly begins in grade 3. The skill is named in the same year the tests start demanding it, and measured only the year after.

Coverage reflects that gap. An EdWeek Research Center survey found 69 percent of school and district leaders say keyboarding is taught in some capacity, with 84 percent in grades 3-5 but 62 percent in K-2 and 57 percent in high school. It exists in the middle and thins at both ends, which is where the youngest hands are. Unclaimed is not the same as unimportant.

What to put in motion before your successor is hired

The first move costs nothing and needs no vendor: a one-page instructional audit. Which grades teach keyboarding, for how many minutes a week, using what materials, and who owns the outcome. A board can adopt that in open session, and it produces a document your successor inherits whether they like your tenure or not. If the answer comes back as four different answers from four elementary schools, you have found the initiative.

The second move is a written success statement before any purchase. Digital Promise's pilot planning guidance recommends drafting one with specific benchmarks, built with educators, leaders and families, before implementation rather than after it. For keyboarding, the honest benchmark is the practitioner convention published by Wisconsin DPI and by Boston Public Schools: about 5 words per minute per grade level at 80 to 95 percent accuracy. Call it a convention when you present it. No validated national cut score exists, and the curriculum director who checks will find that out in ten minutes.

The third move is the costed conversation. A single school can start on School Free or buy School Plus or School Pro at published yearly prices; districts and school networks receive a quote billed by invoice or purchase order. An independent teacher evaluating on their own account pays nothing and has no student limit, which is still one teacher's evaluation rather than a pilot. Put a school's class of 25 on it and that is school use, so it goes through the district's data privacy agreement first, price aside. There is also no rostering integration: a school adds students one by one or by CSV file, and a teacher or parent can create accounts directly, with no child email address and no date of birth collected. Before any of it, read the cohort arithmetic of delaying keyboarding by three years so the audit has a cost attached.

Get the written per-student quote before the vote, not after it.

Key takeaways

• Average superintendent tenure of 5.4 years means a five-year plan's hardest years fall outside the term that wrote it.
• Nearly 64 percent of superintendents in AASA's 2022-23 survey had held their current post fewer than six years.
• Across 48 districts a median 70 percent of student software licenses went completely unused, so most programs end by neglect rather than by vote.
• Districts maintain access to about 3,001 digital tools while students and educators each use roughly four.
• Four durability tests decide the question: scheduled minutes, dependency from another subject, a district-owned measure, and no need for a central-office champion.
• Common Core names keyboarding at grade 3 and first measures it at grade 4, one page in a single sitting, while typed testing commonly starts in grade 3.
• The one-page instructional audit costs nothing; school plans for Meta Typing Club have published yearly prices, and districts and school networks receive a quote.

Frequently asked questions

What will this cost per student?

A single school sees published yearly prices: School Plus is USD 250 a year for 300 student seats and School Pro is USD 500 a year for 1,000. Districts and school networks receive a quote, so ask for a written per-student figure with a term length before it reaches your finance committee. Budget the privacy review as its own line, separate from the software.

Can we try it before we buy anything?

Yes. A new school starts with a 30-day trial with no plan limits and no payment card. An independent teacher can also evaluate on their own account at no cost and with no student limit. A class of 25 real students from your school is still school use, which needs your data privacy agreement signed first.

How much teacher time does keyboarding actually take each week?

Ten to 15 minutes, four days a week, is the practice load. The teacher time that surprises people is setup, because there is no roster sync and a school uploads a CSV file or adds students one by one, then a few minutes a week reviewing per-student results.

What stops my successor from ending this in year one?

Three things, none of them loyalty: minutes written into the elementary schedule, a measure the district owns rather than a vendor dashboard, and a named owner outside your office. Programs that pass those tests get inherited. Programs that depend on the superintendent's interest get reviewed.

What should we ask about student data before any class starts?

Demand four artifacts from every child-facing vendor, us included: a signed data privacy agreement, a named subprocessor list, a written retention and deletion period, and a plain statement of what a child account stores. Our subprocessors are not publicly documented, so hold us to the same four questions.

Where to start this month

Initiatives outlast a superintendent when other adults depend on them, which is why the durable ones look boring on a board agenda. Adopt the one-page keyboarding audit at your next meeting, name an elementary owner who is not in the central office, then ask us for a written per-student quote and read the structured keyboarding sequence for grades K-3 against your own schedule. If the audit shows four schools doing four different things, you already have the case.