I think it would have helped to get a dissenting opinion into a debate. Clifford Stoll had very good arguments in his book, Silicon Snake Oil.

If they *had* to have it, this sort of thing is something you want to grow into, try a few smaller schools, let them come up with their own approach to technology, and see which approach works best and scale it up gradually.

$150? School text books are similar to college text books. I've had to spend over $150 on a single class before in college. Unless prices are fixed for publishers, I don't see this happening. I remember getting fined in high school for book damage from previous students. We had to spend the first day writing down "marks" in the books and I missed a few pages. What would be nice is if on demand publishing became cost effective. As I recall, often only half the book was used in high school or at least a few chapters were skipped by the teacher. It might be beneficial to schools to offer dynamic versions of books that they could order which fit the needs and could also be printed fresh each year as you suggest.

This also leads to a few advantages like current text books. In high school, I had a french book printed in 1978 which is before I was born! It had water damage and was difficult to follow. The slang words weren't even close to current. History classes were often bad as well. I remember my text book talking about exciting "new" events in 1984 when it was 1992. That's not helpful either. Providing new books each year or on demand style books solves the outdated problem.

I used to work at an ISP. One school bought refurbished Macs and gave them to students for home use. These were desktop systems so they didn't need to worry about breaking. They also got a discount on internet access and students were provided desktops to use at school. This could solve some of the breaking problem. Plus the students were issued the computers as long as they were at the district. The school could buy a $300 dell or something and let the students use it at home for 6 years. (well ok maybe a brand that will last longer...) I'm not sold on the idea that computers automatically make students smarter. I would have played with them and not payed attention to homework at that age.

Laptops teach communications skills.

Why should they ? And what kind of skills ? Skills of communication with the support tech ? Such as "It went beepbeepbeebeepbeeeep and then it devoured my paper" ?
Laptops are mere tools, they don't teach anything by themselves. Especially not communication.