I have advised award-winning newspaper and yearbook for 26 years
I'd expect that experience to be of much greater significance than either photography or printing experience. Knowing how your particular students work and react is important. Teachers are necessarily resourceful people, who as a rule are very able at being resourceful in terms of budgets and supplies and are good at making things work.
The fact that you stated to begin with that you are a long time school teacher is specifically something I've been taking into account. Printing is "easy" only to the degree that you either have no concerns about quality and will accept anything, or you are willing to pay attention to many fine details in the entire process (including putting thought into physical operation of a printer).
The beginners are mostly seniors with terrible grades. They have been quite enthusiastic, and fairly quick to pick up camera basics -- they are getting correct exposures with manual settings.
That observation is interesting. One of the most significant characteristics of digital photography today, as opposed to the way film photography worked 15 or more years ago, is the very fast feedback loop. A fast feedback loop allows many people to learn much easier now than it was with film.
And while much of photography today can be computer based with no need to ever make a print, the value one gets from printing has a similar dichotomy. Getting prints made at a "local print shop" has a significantly longer feedback loop than is accomplished when operating your own printer. I would expect that short feedback loop may be a necessary part of your effort to include prints in the curriculum, even when they are done only as a bit of extra inspiration.
In addition to a base fee and providing a packet of 8x10 prints (particularly if you make the choice of images to print rather than letting the students experiment with it on their own), perhaps it might also be useful to work out a way to allow them to pay for the supplies used and let them print whatever they like.
I have thought about using Costco. At $1.49, plus tax, I thought it might be a more expensive option. Since there is one near me, it might be more convenient.
The feedback loop using Costco is too long, but whacking out 3 or 4 variations on a single image right there in class, even at $1 each, might be a terrific way to keep students inspired.
And while 16x20 prints can be done easily with a 17" carriage printer, 20x24 and 20x30 prints cannot. Likewise a 16x20 canvas wrap, which is very easy and inexpensive to produce and terrific for exhibition, requires a larger print than a 17" carriage can produce.
You might find a package of 5 8x10's plus one large print would be more inspiring for students than 10 8x10's. It won't be initially... but by the time they are nearing the end of the course and have seen even a couple of large prints made it will be!
The idea of buying software to run a test print on a regular basis is a great one, no matter what printer I get.
That is an interesting suggestion, and in some cases it is very useful. Note however that as you do more research you'll find that "ink waste" is even a bigger cause of complaints than "clogged heads". The cost of ink per millilitter is enough to get people excited. The relevance is questionable, and the total cost of ink per production print is the figure to pay attention to. In the long run, ink is not such a huge expense.
Still, one theory is that the printer should never be turned off and should never have a head clean routine run unless the head is known to be clogged (most printers run a cleaning routine when powered up, some will do that automatically at other times too). All because of the "wasted" ink. And of course a "maintenance print" will also waste ink... :-)
My view is that because cleaning heads is so easy, I don't let it happen automatically. But that has nothing to do with the cost of ink either, because the amount used for cleaning is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of "test prints" I toss in the trash on a regular basis.
My room, btw, is air conditioned, which mean that humidity will be low. I can keep a printer in a room without air.
That's another one where there are many theories, and but no consistancy. Where I live we experience some very wide ranges in relative humidity over a year's time. I've never been able to correlate humidity to head clogging. I did, years ago, find that printers that do not have vacuum assisted paper transport systems can be very touchy about sheet feeding. Some papers worked well with higher humidity and some worked well with lower humidity. It was extremely annoying.
I would certainly use the printer for more than my photo classes. My publication photographers win national awards, and it would be great to be able to display their work too.
You need a 24" wide printer.
