Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) had been providing a laptop to every student since the COVID-19 pandemic. But each year, elementary schools alone generated roughly 13,000 of device repairs and reported 2,000 lost and stolen devices, driving an estimated $4 million in annual costs.
IT had always treated this as a maintenance issue. However, IT's Project Management Office had been witnessing a different kind of transformation happening elsewhere in the district as a result of Academic Return On Investment (A-ROI) work done in partnership with District Management Group (DMG) in 2022. This work gave leaders a data-driven way to weigh competing investments vis a vis student impact; this type of analysis had reshaped how the district funded student mental health supports across the district. IT wanted that same rigor applied to its own department, an unusual ambition: operational departments in most districts don't typically see their budget decisions as something A-ROI can measure. FUSD's IT department persisted anyway. Drawing on the same framework and underlying analysis DMG had introduced three years earlier, the team built its own A-ROI capacity and used it to reexamine its device maintenance problem.
This work resulted in the IT department making a difficult, multimillion-dollar recommendation about how the district manages student devices, weighing a one-time $8 million investment against the alternative of continuing to absorb roughly $4 million a year in recurring repair and replacement costs indefinitely. At schools that have completed the transition, device repairs, losses, and associated costs have all fallen by 90% across the board.
What is an A-ROI Approach?
DMG’s A-ROI framework is built around a simple set of questions to evaluate initiatives:
The goal is to ensure resources are being deployed where they'll have the greatest impact on students, rather than allocating resources based on tradition or habit.
FUSD’s IT Department Embraces A-ROI
A-ROI measures academic returns (i.e., student outcomes) against cost, allowing districts to see which investments are worth sustaining, scaling back, or cutting altogether. The underlying framework is simple to grasp, even if conducting the analysis and capturing the necessary data can be challenging, especially at the start. Applying that framework to an operational department, though, is a different matter. IT's work sits several steps removed from a classroom, and there is rarely a clean line between a device repair queue and a reading score. Many operational departments keep their distance from A-ROI for exactly this reason, worried that a framework built around student outcomes will find no place for the work they do.
However, FUSD's IT Project Management Office (PMO), led by Dr. Kristi Imberi-Olivares, took the opposite approach. Data analyst Andrew Hendricks played a significant role in carrying out the work. Together, they adapted DMG's framework to its own context, widening the definition of "outcome" to capture measures that affect learning indirectly, weighing stakeholder perception alongside hard data, and treating a strong proxy for academic impact as sufficient to act on rather than waiting for a perfect metric that might never arrive.
More Than a Maintenance Problem — An Instructional Issue
In summer 2024, IT's PMO tackled the high device break rate through a full A-ROI analysis for the first time, combining cost and device data with surveys of students, staff, and families and following the same structure DMG had used to design FUSD’s original 2022 analyses. This work ended up reframing the problem entirely: the A-ROI analysis revealed that the laptop damage and loss issue was not only a maintenance issue — it was an instructional one: staff described classrooms where students arrived with no working device, or where four students shared a single laptop meant for one, opening an equity gap inside classrooms that were supposed to be 1:1 students-to-laptops.
From Analysis to Action
In summer 2025, IT brought its findings to district leadership with a significant recommendation: shift elementary schools from individual, take-home devices to classroom-based device sets. Implementing this recommendation meant transitioning 69 elementary schools across seven regions over six months at a one-time cost of $8 million.
The proposal landed during a year when the district was managing a budget deficit, which made the decision harder to defend but no less necessary. Was it better to keep absorbing roughly $4 million a year in recurring repair and replacement costs, or to make a large upfront investment that would remove the underlying problem? The data, drawn from the same A-ROI methodology that DMG introduced to the district three years earlier, pointed clearly in one direction: elementary sites carried the highest volume of device issues, and survey data suggested less instructional need for devices to travel between school and home at that grade band. The classroom-based model would maintain student access to technology while reducing repair issues and costs due to lost or stolen devices. Ahead of the rollout in November 2025, the team built the infrastructure needed to support the change and measure its effect:
An updated Acceptable Use Policy
A staff-facing internal website
A student device dashboard giving school sites visibility into their own device data for the first time
Working alongside program leads, IT defined its success criteria before rollout began: intended outcomes, metrics, baseline performance, and a clear definition of success for each — the same discipline DMG had modeled during the district’s original A-ROI work.
The Results
As of June 2026, at schools that had transitioned to classroom-based device sets for almost the full school year:
Repair returns fell 93%, from ~4,100 to ~300.
Lost devices fell 99% from ~425 to 3, and reported thefts fell to 0.
Estimated maintenance costs fell 95%.
The district projects the intervention will recover its cost in under three years, potentially sooner based on projected replacement laptop costs.
A closing survey of elementary staff and families found:
Elementary school staff: average satisfaction of 4.0 out of 5, with the large majority reporting instructional time and equitable access to technology had increased or held steady since the shift.
Families: average satisfaction of 3.6 out of 5, with most reporting satisfaction with the new model.
Beyond The Laptop Program
The classroom-sets initiative is IT's most visible A-ROI project, but not its only one. Two others include:
Four-year technology refresh cycle: delivered strong operational results (4.95 out of 5 satisfaction rating) and on budget and ahead of schedule.
E-Sports program review: an IT staff member applied the department's A-ROI approach to evaluate the district's E-Sports program, uncovering demographic disproportionalities in participation that IT is now working with students and coaches to address.
To extend this capacity beyond its own team, IT built an internal A-ROI Playbook adapted from DMG's guidance and delivered a five-part professional learning series to its own staff, walking through how to define objectives, plan an analysis, and estimate cost, using IT's own projects as the working examples throughout.
Lessons Learned and Takeaways for Your District
FUSD's original A-ROI work with DMG focused on instructional initiatives, but the district came to see that the same lens could extend to areas seemingly far removed from student outcomes. Its IT department didn't just borrow that lens for one project. It built lasting internal capacity around it, training its own staff, adapting DMG's methodology to fit operational investments, and creating the internal tools to keep applying it going forward, capacity that is already producing new work beyond the original laptop program. That, as much as the laptop decision itself, may be the most durable outcome of this work: proof that an A-ROI practice can take root and grow within a district well beyond where it started.
FUSD's story will likely feel familiar to any district where operational departments are a layer removed from student outcomes, and as a result, at a distance from accountability for them. IT departments, facilities teams, and HR offices routinely make decisions with real consequences for students without a structured way to measure that impact, or a framework that gives them permission to ask the question in the first place.
What made the difference at FUSD was not a different framework. It was the willingness of an operational team to adapt DMG's A-ROI framework to its work, accept an imperfect but meaningful proxy for impact, and make a difficult, costly recommendation because the data supported it.
A-ROI can do the same for your district, helping you direct resources to where they'll have the greatest impact on students, in departments you might not expect. If you're ready to see what that lens could reveal in your own operations, DMG is ready to help.