I just got a job in a public school in Uppsala, Sweden. Unfortunately, they only run Windows. Yet...
Now I think I could convince them to try Linux, the boss is interested (she's at least half-finnish...)
So I would like to discuss this with admins who has Linux in such an environment. Maybe start in the forum but then switch to emailing - a bit more convenient since I'd like to keep discussing at least until summer (that's the earliest we could start the actual testing.)
I have some Linux knowledge myself, used it at home for some 3-5 years.
First thing to know is what distro's have you found to be best? I have started testing Debian-based, but don't have very much spare time at the moment.

Details: It's a pretty small school, some 700 students.
We have a few servers, running mainly Win2003 server (newly upgraded from NT).
Two subnets: students about 200 computers, staff 75 computers.
Staff runs WinXPpro, students about 70 Win98, rest WinXPpro.

And I'm talking about migrating the clients, not the servers. Keeping a handful of Windows servers up-and-running is not a big problem, but those clients...

So please report here if you're interrested, or email me at peter.haraldson@linneskolan.uppsala.se
(You could of course also use the email-account registered in my account here.)

unless the school is running any kind of windows based education games like the Jump Start type games, there is no reason to even keep the win2k3 servers running.

what age group is this school, what type of programs do they use for teaching the kids, what programs are used by the staff, etc...

unless the school is in bed with MS or MS type products that have no open source comperable programs, then moving 100% over to linux should not be an issue in that enviroment.

conversion should only be real hard if a few things are in place.

-propriatory software to run the business
-propriatory software to communicate with outside business (clients or merchants) that are mandatory
-in the education setting games come into play as well, but a lot of the 'educational' type games out there can be run in the wineX project now called Cedega and the fee for this is rather low.

best of luck and i look forward to reading about the successful conversion from MS to linux.