I belong to an educational community that operates how I expect many do: the school hosts a few mailing lists and a calendar online, and parents, faculty, school board, and volunteer members kinda sorta make it work.
I went through a whole year of that, and I’m personally over it! 
So here I am configuring a new Discourse instance for my educational community… and it is not as forthcoming as I would have expected.
Public schools are such interesting communities, capable of that magic mix of alignment (we want our kids to thrive) and friction (we are blessed with sufficiently diverse backgrounds) that cook something really interesting!
It also means I’ll be hosting an online platform where folks are definitely going to share personal details with each other, even photos of their kids, and a lot of my go-to advice for setting up a private group site is no longer as valid. 
However, I really want to figure this out! Imagine a world where we are not settling for coordinating field trips in a mailing list thread. I want to live in that world!
So I’m bringing this to your folks to help me figure it out. 
Let me share what I’m thinking and doing with this instance, and let’s construct a Discourse for this use case.
The plan so far:
- Simple categories: community (general anything talk), people (free form profile topic/user wall and linked from profile), knowledge (wiki topics for gathering evergreen info), todo (actionable tasks with topics that can be closed)
- Horizon theme: simple and works for this community, emphasis on ease to find info rather than shiny gimmicks
- Chat rooms: starting out with two, a “townhall” type and a help channel (no reason to make it difficult to get help for any thing, ya know?)
- Groups for mentioning/messaging: I plan to test this with a small core group of power volunteers to find if this will be useful
- End of year plan: I plan to study and document how we should garden the community content, including turning content into PMs or deleting
Keeping it simple works here, which means we can defer most plugins until a feature is requested. 
I’ll reply with updates as I invite the first core group and subsequent community members. In the meantime, what are challenges or ideas do you have for this use case? Have you hosted a Discourse for your educational community? Let me know.