I have set up a gmail account for every student in the school so that we have a consistent email address contact for every student. We did firstinitiallastnamegraduationyear@. This is a gmail account that will follow them through their school career rather than keep track of personal emails.
Love this idea! I imagine you could also use the labels feature for other identifying and sorting possibilities, e.g., "football" if they played on the team. "drama" if they were ever in a show, etc.