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I used to go to Gould Academy, right before I graduated a few years ago, they migrated from Windows to Red Hat Linux, and also Open Office. If you want some suggestions, I would e-mail the IT people, search the website for either Harry Dresser, or Derek Dresser. I am sure they would love to talk to anybody about how they got support for the migration! http://www.gouldacademy.org/

With that said, Gould transitioned from a Novell-centered network with Windows 3.11 to Novell-centered with Windows9x to Linux and did it quite successfully, as far as I can tell. The first year the lab in the main classroom building went all-Linux, it went to Linux prior to the start of Summer School and the summer session was, in many ways, a beta. I'd say it worked; the major gripes generally came from people who had been used to how the lab used to be, whereas students who were new to Gould had little or no trouble adapting. From an IT perspective, it helped matters greatly; not having to either fight Fortres or other Win9x lockdown tools or reimage machines on a regular basis makes life so much better.

Ok, so, Gould Academy is where I went, and they use linux for everyday use, in the labs, classrooms and even faculty offices. Mostly what students learned to use was IceWM, Konqueror as a file manager, OpenOffice, Mozilla (although Firefox might be a better choice), gAIM (not in class!), the Gimp and xpdf.
They didn't have a big budget for the computers, so they used the old 386 (true, I've used them!) and a bunch of old machines, bought a dual Xeon 733 MHz server, and ran LTSP on the whole thing. They had a special file server with a quota of about 1 Gig for students in their home directory, which was plenty, and a separate mail server.
I think that if you install those PIII with LTSP you'll be missing out on responsiveness, so instead maybe install the same distro on all of them, and use a NIS domain for login (with gdm, or even better, Entrance, which is prettier than gdm to look at!) and getting one machine with several drives to use as NFS server for the /home directories would be good.
Then if you want to start a multimedia class, it turns out a lot of people are actually thrilled when using Blender. A whole bunch of people active on Blender forums right now are not much older than 13. I've basically taught my Linux professor at Gould to use blender, and the Advanced Linux class at the same time.
I think that's plenty of things to show eye-candy and the real horse-power you can get in the managing of such a lab with linux.
Also, most of these programs have spanish localizations, iirc.

My high school, where I have also taught summer classes, switched to primarily using Linux for school-owned, student-accessed computers. It's been working pretty well, and it's been a definite success in terms of using older hardware; check out the partial documentation, which includes contact info for the admin. In short, my experience was that new students (who arrived for the summer) found what they expected--email and wordprocessing--and were only stumped by the lack of a way to use floppies (which, in the opinion of myself and the admins, was a Good Thing--the danged things are obsolete and a PITA anyhow). The lab uptime was much better, as well. The returning (regular-year) students complained a bit more, but I saw that more as being unhappy with change and a result of not being able to download and play Windows games anymore.

My high school, where I have also taught summer classes, switched to primarily using Linux for school-owned, student-accessed computers. It's been working pretty well, and it's been a definite success in terms of using older hardware; check out the partial documentation, which includes contact info for the admin. In short, my experience was that new students (who arrived for the summer) found what they expected--email and wordprocessing--and were only stumped by the lack of a way to use floppies (which, in the opinion of myself and the admins, was a Good Thing--the danged things are obsolete and a PITA anyhow). The lab uptime was much better, as well. The returning (regular-year) students complained a bit more, but I saw that more as being unhappy with change and a result of not being able to download and play Windows games anymore.

Maybe I'm weird, but I actually liked the breadth of my studies in K-12. I'm glad that I had read a couple of classic novels, read a bunch of classic poems, and learned to differentiate before I graduated from high school. I've enjoyed at least some of the readings in every English class I've ever taken, and I also enjoyed being able to prove stuff in Geometry and calc and whatnot. Heck, I can still remember a lot of what I did in highschool.

In some ways, I'd compare the breadth approach to my high school's sports requirement--all freshmen are required to have two seasons of competitive sports, and all other students are required to have one per year. Further, those who are not involved in competitive sports must participate in non-competitive activities (such as drama, woodworking, et al). Due to that sports requirement, I went out and tried playing lacrosse my freshman year. I'd never picked up a lacrosse stick before, and I've never considered myself much of an athlete. However, I am now a passionate lacrosse fan and wish I still were playing. A lot of people do end up trying a sport and deciding they don't like it, but a lot of people also end up trying a sport and deciding they do like it. It's an inconvenience for the former and a great addition to the fulfillment of the latter.

(Now, if he could solve the "accomplishment vs grades" issue, I'd be much indebted.)

Yeah, but you can't get a "trusted" Verisign cert for a .us domain--only for .com, .net, and .org (last I looked; I suppose they're prolly allowing some other domains now). For that reason, my high school went from .pvt.k12.me.us to .org. The CIO there is pretty big into standards, which is prolly why we didn't get the .com (which was open at the time of the .org purchase) or the .edu (which, at least according to some RFCs I've seen but am too lazy to look up, is supposed to be only for four-year, accredited, post-secondary institutions).

I've had similar problems with people on campus networks. I went to a prep school with a Novell net and a T1, and I'm now at college with a campus network. Guess what? I've seen AOL installs wreak havoc with networking setup both places. For some reason, AOL can get very unhappy when you try to change network settings--even TCP/IP Ethernet settings. In one case, I had to reboot to safe mode and remove AOL before I could get the TCP/IP changes to work (had to change the setup on a friend's computer when IT installed a firewall). The computer would hang if I tried to remove AOL in normal mode, either by removing the AOL Adapter from Network properties or by using the unistall option from Add/Remove programs. It finally gave up when I removed it in safe mode. I've also seen computers that weren't seeing the network at all suddenly start working again when I removed AOL.

Bottom line: AOL does not play well with other networking components, and the AOL software engineers really need to do something about it. Or people like me will continue to laugh anytime they see aol.com at the end of an email address.