Leander School District Installs Four New Inkjet Presses

When Leander Independent School District decided to upgrade its inkjet capabilities, one would think it would chose a Xerox machine. After all, the Leander, Texas, district — which serves more than 43,000 students in nearly 50 locations — had been a Xerox shop for more than 30 years. And Chuck Wright, manager of the district’s Document Production Center, even worked for Xerox for 12 years, with Leander as one of his clients.

But despite being pleased with the service and quality of his in-plant’s Xerox Baltoro, Wright admits it was never a perfect fit.

“I really don’t think it was an ideal device for our particular environment,” Wright notes. “We do anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 jobs a day in our shop. And so, there’s a lot of starting and stopping, and the Baltoro just isn’t designed to do that well. But it did give us the opportunity to introduce to our district a low-cost color option at a very comparable rate to black-and-white.”

Customers recognized that, and color inkjet volumes rose 45% in 2025, even as monochrome volumes dropped. Inspired by those numbers, Wright began his quest to upgrade his shop’s inkjet capabilities.

Because of Xerox’s decision to discontinue the Baltoro, the playing field was wide open.

“Until recently [Xerox] didn’t have another option for inkjet color, so we didn’t even entertain them,” Wright says. “We began to bring in vendors back in Spring 2025. We brought in everyone from Konica Minolta to Sharp to Riso, and a vendor or two that sold Kyocera and we basically gave everyone the same spiel: ‘Here’s our work. Here’s what we do. Here’s our workflow. Here’s our challenges. Here’s what our customers are telling us.’ And we gave them the opportunity to tour our shop, spend time with our lead to understand workflow so that they could be empowered to make a recommendation that would address those concerns and meet the needs that we had, and carry us forward for the next five years or so.”

Wright attended the 2025 Inkjet Summit and talked to every inkjet vendor there to get a feel for how each technology worked, how they were different, and which would best fit his in-plant’s needs. He credits those intense conversations with helping him make the final decision.

In the end, a Kyocera distributor, Visual Edge IT, won his in-plant over. In early December 2025 his six-employee shop installed two Kyocera TaskAlfa 15000C inkjet presses with in-line Plockmatic bookletmakers and GBC punching for coil binding. The in-plant also installed two additional Kyocera TaskAlfa 15000Cs with in-line Ricoh-manufactured bookletmakers. These replaced two Xerox D136s, a Nuvera 144, and the Baltoro. Except for a Xerox Iridesse, the in-plant is now an all-inkjet operation.

“So we went from two bookletmakers to four, and from one inkjet press to four,” Wright proclaims. “And our cost per impression, regardless of whether it’s black-and-white or color, is exactly the same.”

The result so far has been incredibly promising. Wright estimates the district will see year-over-year savings of around $25,000 between leasing and consumable costs. On top of that, the ability to add low-cost color to educational materials is improving the learning experience for students.

“It’s just changing the impact that printing has in the classroom because now [materials] can have color to accentuate those things that are important that that teacher wants to communicate and resonate with that kid,” he says.

Wright is excited about the new presses, and foresees inkjet color growing rapidly as schools continue to realize they can get more creative without raising costs.

“We’re excited about where we are,” Wright says. “I know that every day is a new day in the printing industry. I know that when you deal with the volume of work that we do that any little bump is felt, but we’re confident that over the long term we’re going to be really glad that we did this.”