# When the Data Changed the Question Honoring SDP Fellowship alumnus Andrew Hendricks, a runner-up for the 2026 Strategic Data Impact Award, for uncovering an unexpected barrier to learning in Fresno Unified School District. August 19, 2026 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) How could a program designed to promote digital equity end up creating new barriers to learning? That was not the question Andrew Hendricks and his colleagues expected to answer when they began studying Fresno Unified School District's one-to-one student laptop program. The COVID-19 pandemic had prompted school systems across the country to ensure students could continue learning outside the classroom, and Fresno Unified responded by providing every student with a device for use at school and at home. Even after students returned to classrooms, the program remained in place as part of the district's commitment to digital equity. Fresno Unified serves more than 70,000 students and is one of California's largest school districts. Like any technology initiative of that scale, the one-to-one laptop program also generated operational challenges. Thousands of student devices meant thousands of opportunities for laptops to be broken, lost, repaired, or replaced. As part of an Academic Return on Investment (A-ROI) project through the Strategic Data Project Fellowship, Hendricks and his colleagues set out to examine how the district's one-to-one laptop initiative was functioning and whether the data could point to opportunities for improvement. On the surface, the challenge appeared to be operational, and the team expected their analysis would lead to practical changes. Instead, the data fundamentally changed their question. **From an operational problem to an instructional one** "We were thinking at the start that this would be more of like, 'Hey, what would be the best way to lower the breakage? Can we order some screen protectors? Do we need cases?'" Hendricks recalled. "But when we actually cleaned the data, we found the volume of these problems was a lot higher than we had really anticipated." The team began by examining years of IT maintenance records documenting broken and lost devices across the district. Cleaning and organizing those records revealed patterns in the scale and frequency of the problem, but not its consequences. To understand what those patterns meant for students and teachers, the team paired the operational data with surveys from educators across the district. "What we were seeing was a response like, 'A broken laptop hits my classroom. I have to send the students to the library to get a laptop, and then they miss class time. Sometimes the library doesn't have a laptop. Now they can't even access the lesson that I'm teaching.'" Those conversations reframed the team's understanding of what they were seeing in the data. Broken and lost devices were not simply creating more work for the IT department. They were actually disrupting instruction. And, there was also another consequential discovery. "What really was ironic was that this program was intended to support digital equity," Hendricks explained. "But what we found was that breakage and loss were not evenly distributed across the system. It really impacted a smaller group of students at much higher rates." The students experiencing repeated device problems were also the students repeatedly losing access to classroom learning. In other words, the barriers created by the program were not evenly shared. They fell most heavily on a relatively small group of students, thus becoming the very opposite of the equity the initiative had been designed to promote. **Turning evidence into action** The question had changed, and the district's approach changed with it. With leadership from Hendricks' SDP supervisor, Dr. Kristi Imberi-Olivares, Chief Technology Officer Tami Lundberg, and Executive Director Don Soynthisane, the team brought its findings to Fresno Unified's executive leadership and recommended returning all 64 elementary schools—serving approximately 35,000 students—to a classroom-based laptop model.The district invested millions of dollars to make the transition and equipped every elementary classroom with dedicated device carts and additional laptops to ensure students could stay in class when technical issues arose. The results were striking. As of June 2026, schools that returned to classroom sets saw laptop repairs decrease 93%, from 4,121 to 275, while losses dropped 99%, from 426 to just three. Estimated maintenance costs fell 95%, from approximately $1 million to $56,000. Based on these results, the investment in the new model is projected to pay for itself in less than three years. For Hendricks, the project demonstrated what becomes possible when organizations move beyond anecdotes and pair rigorous analysis with the experiences of the people closest to the work. "Learning that information led to action," he reflected. "We've moved from anecdotal to evidence, and now we have the information we need to make a recommendation feeling pretty confident." It was this ability to uncover an unexpected barrier to learning, translate evidence into action, and improve educational opportunity for thousands of students that earned Hendricks recognition as one of the 2026 Strategic Data Impact Award Runner-Ups. Watch Hendricks share the story behind the project in the 2026 Strategic Data Impact Award video. See also:- [ SDP Blog ](/tags/sdp-blog) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)