Calgary Arts Academy relied on a third-party Apple consultancy that was spending steadily without moving the school forward. With a fixed operating budget, the school could not afford to replace its entire computer fleet and its network at once — yet both were overdue, and its first iPads had just arrived with no way to manage them.
Rather than asking for a budget the school did not have, RIPEDA built a plan that largely paid for itself — pairing disciplined asset resale and community grant funding with a phased rebuild of the network, servers, and device fleet.
Cleaned, re-imaged, and resold aging Macs through an ongoing evergreen program, combined with Parent Council casino funding and an iPad grant — covering the bulk of new hardware without touching the operating budget.
Rebuilt servers on a current OS, stood up automated nightly cross-campus and off-site backups, and stabilized the network — fibre-linking portables and raising the uplink from 5 to 100 Mbps.
Rolled out 100+ MacBook Air and Pro laptops and 50+ iPads with carts, cases, staff training, and managed deployment; moved admins to MacBook Air with Thunderbolt displays; added Apple TV; and secured shared student devices.
Rather than a one-time refresh, RIPEDA runs an ongoing evergreen program — older devices are resold each cycle to help fund their own replacements. The fleet stays under warranty, repair costs fall, and the school's total cost of ownership drops year over year.
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Apple fleet | End-of-life white MacBooks | Fully replaced in 3 years |
| Devices deployed | Aging, out of warranty | 100+ Macs & 50+ iPads |
| Funding model | Full cost to the school | $16K+ initial resale + grants |
| Cost of ownership | Rising repair costs | Lowered via ongoing evergreen resale |
| Accounting migration | $9.5K provider quote | ~$8K under quote |
| Internet & network | 5 Mbps, frequent outages | 100 Mbps, stable, no overages |
| Data protection | Backups only on paper | Nightly cross-campus + off-site |
| IT spend | Untracked | Tracked, with a buying process |
“The school moved from a fleet at end-of-life and a foundation at constant risk to a modern, managed, well-documented environment — and did so within a budget everyone had assumed made it impossible.”
The same model applies wherever an organization needs to modernize faster than its budget seems to allow: make the transformation largely pay for itself, and never deploy new tools onto a foundation that cannot hold them.
