ALT Many public-sector artificial intelligence systems fail not at the point of model development, but at the point of deployment. Systems that perform well in internal testing may still stall because the receiving institution lacks the approvals, data arrangements, human oversight, operational capacity, fiscal continuity, or legal clarity needed for broader rollout. Existing responsible AI and model evaluation frameworks are valuable, but they primarily assess models, datasets, and developer-side processes, not the readiness of the institution that must use the system in practice. We introduce Institutional Alignment Readiness (IAR), a five-dimensional framework for assessing deployment readiness in public systems. The framework is designed for resource-constrained settings, where gaps between technical viability and responsible deployment are most acute. It is grounded in two anonymized operational cases from a large public education system: an image-based anthropometric screening tool a