"Only today (Thursday, 05 March) we had a fire alarm test and the administration staff were able to quickly and effectively print data off from the system showing who was on site." You gotta say it's lucky that there wasn't a fire in the server room. I can just imagine getting a tech support call during a fire saying "my printers not working"

You'd be surprised to know how much open source is used in schools. Granted most of it isn't at the desktop, but there are a large number of schools using things like Audacity, IPCop, Nagios, Zimbra, Moodle, Drupal, etc on Linux. So ask the question why are these apps used in schools, and it usually is because they are best of breed software in it's category. So if you want to get more free/open source software into schools, then make killer applications that give them a reason to be there.