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Personal preference: I've worked with both government and educational organizations and both should adhere to (and often demand) standards compliance and more importantly accessability per the 508 guidelines. One of the ways to avoid scrapping an entire leg of a project when they send out the accessability police is to avoid Javascript as much as possible in those cases.
This is not to say that you **CAN'T** use Javascript and still adhere to those standards, it's just that you sometimes have to jump through a few hoops to make it work, basically - it's often more difficult.
So the reasoning for my long-winded explanation is in this case I would probably use a server-side solution in perl, php, etc., and try to dispense with the J.S. altogether.
So while you're giving that a thought, let's see some examples. :-)