A few years ago, I was working as the newspaper advisor at my high school when I realized a couple of things: we did not have the budget to print more than one newspaper a year and the website we were using cost the same as printing one newspaper per year.
What I decided to do was to build a better version of the website we were purchasing so that we would once again have a small budget to print one edition or purchase some equipment. I also discovered that the former teacher selling school newspapers to schools across the country was amassing a small fortune (well, a big fortune compared to what I was making as a teacher) building Wordpress sites with a template.
We build Joomla sites with a template. Joomla is pretty much the same thing, and many companies sell the exact same templates for each system. The main downfall I noticed about using the Wordpress sites was that I was able to break the site as an advisor. My plan for your school newspaper site is to set it up so that you can't break it and your kids can update it without learning way too much. I know from experience that it's hard enough just to get kids to join the newspaper.