Your Strategic Plan Is Invisible to Your Community

Over the course of my career, I have watched district after district go through a version of the same process: we spend months — sometimes the better part of a year — building a strategic plan. We hold board retreats and community input sessions. We survey stakeholders, draft goals, revise language, and align measures to outcomes. We present the finished product at a public board meeting, and stakeholders applaud the effort. The document is then uploaded to the district website, often as a PDF, and it effectively disappears.

Not officially, of course. The plan is still technically available. But if we are being honest with ourselves, how many clicks does it take for a parent or community member to find it? And once they do, can they determine where the district stands on any of its goals? For most districts, the honest answer to that second question is no.

I am concerned that this pattern — well-intentioned planning followed by functional invisibility — is quietly eroding the trust that strategic plans are meant to build. When a district invests significant time, resources, and community goodwill into creating a strategic plan, and that plan then becomes inaccessible in any practical sense, the message to stakeholders is not what we intend it to be.

The Question Behind the Question

Consider a scene that plays out in boardrooms across the country with remarkable consistency. It is six or eight months after the strategic plan was adopted. A board member asks, during a public meeting, "Where are we on Goal 3?"

The room shifts. An administrator pulls up a spreadsheet, or begins navigating a slide deck that was last updated for a previous meeting. The data is not current. The formatting is inconsistent across goals. Half the metrics require verbal context that is not captured in the slides, and the other half require a different file entirely.

The board member nods politely, but the question behind the question was not really about Goal 3. It was about whether the strategic plan is actually driving the district's work, or whether it was an exercise — something we did because we were supposed to, rather than something we use because it matters.

When the answer to that question is unclear, it is not because the work is not happening. In many districts, the work is happening. Curriculum directors are hitting assessment targets. Principals are closing equity gaps. MTSS teams are intervening early and tracking outcomes. However, that progress is locked inside spreadsheets and slide decks that never reach the people who need to see them: the board, the community, and often the staff themselves.

The plan is alive. It simply looks dead from the outside.

Accessible Is Not the Same as Visible

There is a meaningful distinction between making a strategic plan accessible and making it visible, and I think we often conflate the two.

Accessible means that someone can find the document if they go looking. The PDF exists on the website. The board presentation is archived in meeting minutes. The data lives in a spreadsheet on a shared drive. In a technical sense, the information is available.

Visible means something different. Visibility means that a stakeholder encounters the plan naturally, understands it without specialized knowledge, and can see progress over time without needing to request an explanation from an administrator.

Consider the difference between a hospital that files its patient satisfaction data in a cabinet and one that displays it on a screen in the lobby. The data is the same. The message about institutional accountability is entirely different.

Our strategic plans deserve a similar standard. When we make the plan visible — not just accessible — we signal to our communities that the goals we adopted are ones we take seriously enough to report on publicly, in real time, with evidence attached.

What Visibility Requires

A visible strategic plan does not require a data analytics team or a sophisticated technology platform. It requires a commitment to three principles that, in my experience, most districts understand but have not yet operationalized.

The first is simplicity. Every goal needs a current status that a community member — not a data analyst, not a curriculum specialist, but a parent or taxpayer — can understand in seconds. This does not mean oversimplification. It means presenting progress in a way that is clear, honest, and interpretable without requiring a walk-through from the person who created the spreadsheet.

The second is evidence. Goals should not simply display a status indicator; they should connect to the supporting data, artifacts, or documentation that substantiate that status. If a district reports that it is making progress on literacy, it strengthens the claim considerably to link directly to the assessment data. If a district says it is expanding access to advanced coursework, the enrollment figures should be attached. When we connect evidence directly to our stated goals, we shift the conversation from "trust us" to "see for yourself." That shift matters.

The third is ownership and cadence. Someone must own the update cycle for each goal, and those updates must occur on a predictable schedule — not when we get around to it, and not in a flurry of activity before the next board meeting. A regular rhythm of updates signals to the community that the strategic plan is a living document, one the district returns to deliberately and consistently, rather than a historical artifact that surfaces only when someone asks about it.

What Changes When the Plan Is Visible

When these three principles are in place — simplicity, evidence, and regular ownership — something meaningful shifts in how a district communicates with its stakeholders.

Board meetings become conversations about strategy and direction rather than data retrieval exercises. Community members begin referencing specific goals in public comment, because they have seen them and can engage with them substantively. Staff see their work reflected in something the district clearly values and reports on publicly.

Furthermore, the administrators who are doing the hard work of implementation — the work that so often goes unseen — finally receive credit for it. Their progress is no longer trapped inside internal documents. It is visible to the people whose support and confidence they need most.

The Cost of Invisibility

The districts that get this right are not necessarily the ones with the largest budgets or the most sophisticated data teams. They are the ones that decided their strategic plan was too important to remain invisible.

If we spent months building a plan — if we asked our communities to show up and contribute their time and their perspectives — then we owe them the ability to see what came of it. And if our boards are asking "where are we on Goal 3?" and the answer requires someone to scramble, that is not fundamentally a data problem. It is a visibility problem. The plan is not missing. It is simply not where anyone can see it.

What, then, is our responsibility? I would suggest that it is to treat the communication of our strategic plan with the same intentionality we brought to its creation. The planning process deserves that. Our communities deserve that. And the educators doing the work deserve to have their progress seen.