Ok, the unhappy student crisis seems to be passed and courses are resuming after the summer break. There were some tense moments with one miserable student but the whole thing finally resolved without bloodshed.
Screenshots, you ask? Welll...
This might need some explaining since it's basically hacked into stone without much preplanning and it's been expanded and modified everytime I've tried some new ideas.
On top is the medical personnel quarters and the combined hospital/sleeping area. The hospital has actually seen surprisingly little use; apart from two miners injured in cave-in there have been maybe one or two actual student medical cases. For sleeping purposes this area has been enough for at least 80 students.
To far left is what is left of the last iteration of scare closets; none of them seemed to work that well. Then again, I haven't had any suitably scary monsters on this map during the whole seven years. That means I haven't managed to get any Discipline training done even when the students are approaching Legendary combat skills. Right next to the empty scare closet area is the prepared meal stockpile.
To the right is the dining area. To far right, in the access tunnel leading to mist generators and other machinery you can see a student in what seems to be a perpetual state of falling; I'm waiting to see if he'll crash into a wall like some others have done earlier.
At the bottom is the drink stockpile. Since dwarves now drink faster than in 34.11 there's actually no need for a bigger stockpile.
In the middle, of course, is the training area. The whole central area has been filled with spike traps, each with a single wooden training spear. I noticed later that I could have put way more spears into the traps with no added risk. I filled some of the area with statues and later filled it with some more to get it actually ready for students; luckily even this area will be enough for all the children of Searingmines.
One level up would be the bank of twenty mist generators for Swimming training but those are now offline because, well, they didn't actually train much Swimming. I might switch them on again if there's any need for additional happy thoughts.
In my next fort I'll probably build an actually thought out and designed version of this, using lessons learned in this test bench setup.