The piece before this one was about what walks out the door when someone leaves. The plan stays. The goals stay. The data sheets stay. What goes is the part nobody wrote down: the way a child needs to be asked, the third time being the one that lands.
The usual answer to that is to look harder for the right person. Hire better. Retain better. Ask the good ones to stay longer than this field usually lets them.
We have watched that answer fail for sixteen years, and it does not fail because the people are bad. It fails because it asks one person to solve something that was never theirs. The person who stayed late to learn a child was not paid for that time. The person who wrote the best notes anyone had seen took them with her, because they were hers. Nothing in the arrangement asked the organization to keep what she knew. It only asked her to know it.
Behavior follows the contingencies around it. That is the science this whole field is built on, and it works on an organization the same way it works on a child. If it is easy to record what someone learned about a kid on a Tuesday, and easy for the next person to find it on Wednesday, that is what people will do. If it is not, that knowledge lives in somebody's head and leaves in somebody's car, and everybody calls it a staffing problem.
So a program is not a collection of good people who happen to work together. It is what those people can hand each other.
Which makes the question about a program not how good its best clinician is, but what the program keeps. What does a new person get on their first morning besides a file? When someone learns something about a child on a Tuesday, where does it go? If the person who knows this child best were gone tomorrow, what would still be here?
Those questions have unglamorous answers. They are about where things are written down, who can see them, and whether finding them is easier than asking.
For a family none of this is abstract. A parent cannot audit a caseload or read a turnover report. What a parent sees is whether their child starts over. Whether the new person already knows what sets their child off, or learns it the hard way, in front of the child, over weeks the child pays for.
People will leave, and they should be able to. What we get to decide is what it costs the child when they do.