go to your school lab systems. load the scene up and then save it out as maya ascii and see if you can read that in.

Also you could save it out as obj or fbx and try reading those in. This will delete any strange or incomputable history nodes and should let you read the file in on your home machine.

If this fixes the problem and you can then systematically delete elements from the history to find where the incompatibility is and resolve it.

Also both the lab and home machines of maya 2009 but are they both the same level? I mean both unlimited, complete, etc. If one is unlimited and the other is complete for instance you can have issues.