Strategy for managing laptop users

I am IT admin at a school that currently has 75 iMacs. I manage users through Workgroup Manager. We are deploying 40 MacBooks to be assigned permanently to individual students. These students should continue to be able to log iMacs with network-mounted home directories. Home directory on laptops will not be synched with the server. I imagine one way to handle this would be so that they log in as portable home network user to laptop but I disable home directory sync, so that they maintain two different home directories (one locally on the macbook, one networked home on iMacs). Alternatively, it would be OK if I create local user accounts on their MacBooks. For as long as I am able to manage what they can do, especially what apps they can run. In addition, it is required that home directory on MacBooks is in a different partition, as I would only reimage the system partition. Any comments on what may be preferred approach would be appreciated.