If you don't back up, you'll have to start backing up to restore. If you do backup, you need to test your backups today. For the love of god don't just assume your stuff comes back out ok.

Picking your boss. If you're not up a creek looking for work, that interview is to let you meet your managers, talk to some workers about the managers.

When I started working it was "If I can just get in the door"

When I was in my 20's it was "What cool things will this job do for me"

Now That i'm in my 30's its "Will I be able to work with these people"

I just started working from home. Every little noise was killing me. I left the house before noon on day one and came back with a pair of Bose QC 3. They're expensive but they really work wonders. They completely remove low frequency and reduce mid and upper ranges to a calm level. I can still hear people in the room talking, but it's more like they're mumbling to themselves.

The QC 15's are cheaper, have the same active nr, but also completely cover the ear and have good passive nr. I would have gone for this, but I didn't want something bulky and hot over my ears all the time.

Are they worth $300? As a college student, probably not. Mid and high reduction isn't any better than covering your ears with your hands. As an adult trying to work from home, They're worth it, not a great deal but helpful none the less.

Sure, they're going to sue. It's one of our core values you know? Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the Ineffable right to drag anyone you disagree with though court, beat them up with your abundant supply of money and time until you get your way or they give you a fat check to make you go away.

It's the schools job to keep the place safe and clean and educational. That means they need to kick out asshats and verified wolf criers, and they had damn well do their job or they'll end up with a wholly different six-pack of lawsuits when then fail to kick a real pedo teacher to the curb.

My favorite part is where they're saying the principal violated their privacy by making them log in to facebook at the school. You posted a severely damning lie about an agent of the school on a pseudo-public social website and now you're worried about your privacy?

Suspended for 10 days is a puny slap on the wrist. Yes Honor Roll students screw up too, and just because they generally do the write thing doesn't mean they shouldn't be punished, people need to wake up, children need appropriate and sane levels of discipline or they turn in to jack-asses later in life.

Mac Linux and Windows can all deal with Windows network shares quite adeptly.
I'm going to assume if you're going to go cross platform and gmail, you expect to use google apps as an office replacement as well.

Can it work? Absolutely. Should it be done? Probably not.

Road bumps and Walls to expect:
Start getting people to use google apps office equivalents, solve those problems first.
If everyone can stomach google apps, then consider the email. Have your Exchange server toss up a test group of email up there.
If the above worked, you might be able to get away with it, but keep in mind:

Bifurcating support is expensive in both time and money.
Users on each disparate system will not be able to self help people on other systems.
Getting people spun up on new/different systems will be very painful for them, and you.
AD integration is nearly a waste of time on anything but Windows.
Software AND patch management on a Windows network can be trivially easy with very little setup, not quite so much on the other platforms.
Wine is purely reserved for one off scenarios, if a large part of your plan is wine, you'd be better off with windows or RDesktop and a terminal server.