Which Palm powered handheld do you recommend?

This varies depending on your needs. A good place to start is to see a list of various Palm Handhelds.

Please note: Your Palm must have a memory card (SD card) slot. If you want to use pictures, you’ll definitely need a color Palm.

To get the very best performance, you will want a device that uses Palm OS version 5.0 or higher. This is particularly important if you are putting the entire school district on one SD card. With a 5.0 device, Principalm will typically allow you to find any student (among tens of thousands!) within a second or so.