Very good observation you made there, I guess that will depend on how the school want to use the network. I think connecting to a central server, would be a good option cause you can control what users do and how the information is accessed.
But if routing is required between the vlan groups, that could be enabled from the switch web-based admin interface, that is if the switch is a layer 3 device, because most layer 2 switches does not have routing capabilities, unless there is a router in between.