What operating system should I put on the donated computers for SoaS at a school?

Anurag a CS student at BU, my husband, a CS grad from MIT and I, a techie never give upper, are going to be working on Monday to take the pile of computers in my house and prepare them for installing in the GPA school on Weds.

We will be wiping all the hard disks and putting on something else.

Can I put install some version of the boothelper on the hard drive so when it boots off of the hard drive it automatically looks for a USB? I think this would be perferred especially for older computer that don't let us set the bios for USB boot preference.

Perhaps with new computers we should install Sugar locally and make it the "Room 33" user so that guests can get access with out a stick.