Whats the best way to set up logins for a network that is just sharing one computer and external harddrive?

Hi there,
I am setting up a basic network for a primary school.
They have about 30 odd machines connected to the internet via ethernet cables and are networked.

I wanted to setup a shared facility for all the kids where they could go to any machine and then go to a shared drive that they could click on and enter their user details.

There is not a 'real server' as such just a machine behaving like a server with an external drive that is shared.  On the shared drive what would be the best way.....maybe setup a folder for each student and create permissions for logins that a student could enter to access their folder on the shared drive.... for eg rdoolan and password doolan???

It's a primary school and I worried that if I dont give each student some sort of permission based login and just share the drive with no permissions at all then some kids may just go and delete everything whether it be accidental or not.

We havent got a server with Server 2003 or local machines with XP pro, just every machine has Windows 2000 on it.

The kids would login to any machine locally using the username: student and password of 'password.

When they login there is a shortcut to the desktop connecting to the shared drive.  When they click on this it would ask for their username and password.

Is there a way that I can import user settings from a document that would maybe add all the local users onto the one machine acting as a server and then allocate the user permissions to the folder relating to each student?

Would this be an efficient way of doing it or is there a better way???

Thanks for your help

Ray