I’m a huge proponent of VR, but I wouldn’t make an investment in VR equipment for a school at this point. It certainly is not future proof and the current systems are already nearing the end of their lifecycle. More importantly, they aren’t designed well for collaborative use which is more important for a group setting. For 10K you could probably get 2-3 Vives and PC’s to power them, but they’d each require a room to be set up in, and they’d be obsolete by 2019.
You mentioned no prototyping equipment (which is where I’d want to invest the most for students) but I would redefine what you consider prototyping equipment. Do students have access to things like soldering workstations, CNC mills, development boards? I wish things like Raspberry Pi and Arduino and boxes of wires and resistors and components were more readily available when I was in school. Students can buy a lot of that stuff themselves, but nothing is worse than having to shut down a project and wait 2 days because you realize you ran out of the right resistor.
Not sure what you could buy for “AI” - unless it was for things like generative 3D software. Most work in AI is dependent on knowing how to program & having access to large scale cloud computing power, which is cheaper to buy then build.