But they didn't just ban GMail. The banned the entire Google Docs/Workspace portfolio.
And Chromebooks, by definition.
Will be fun if you're a school that just bought 1000 Chromebooks.
There alternatives to the Google Docs part too, like Collabora.
It will probably require some work and won't be as polished, but there are totally ways have all of that within the EU.
That's great, except now you need an army of IT people to stitch all these services together into one actual program and make them work. Before you just called google. And you need hardware. And fun as all this hard work might sound for tech people like us, your average teacher or principle doesn't actually know how any of this will work and has basically no budget. Meanwhile the same kids are setting up their own gmail accounts, google groups, facebook messenger etc so any hope of actual privacy is gone...