Membership database

First of all, my knowledge of PHP/MySQL doen't go much past installing wizards for blogs and guestbooks and then hacking the files to the point of requiring me to re-uploading the originals.

I've volunteered to stay on as webmaster for the state Jaycee organization next year and the 2005 president-elect would like to put the membership datebase for the entire state online (so chapter presidents and directors will know what members are due in what month.) That's a lot of private info, so I would need to put some controls on accress. The chapters are grouped into regions and then into districts within the regions. For instance, let's say Region 1 has 4 chapters: A,B,C,D. Chapters A,B are in District 1 and C,D are in District 2. So what I'm hoping for is 3 levels (fields) of access: Region, District & Chapter. Chapter President A can only access the Chapter A, District Director 1-1 can only access chapters A & B, Region Director 1 can only access chapters A,B,C,D, etc. (repeat for remaining regions, starting with chapters E,F,G,H,... in Region 2, etc.) So my questions are:

* Is there a PHP script that can handle password, access and display (that won't blow my fragile little mind)? I was thinking that the front-end page could just contain three inputs for passwords:

Chapter password: (input)
District password: (input)
Region password (input)

* I have the entire database on an Excel file (or I can convert w/ openOffice.) Once I have the columns properly named, can that be imported into MySQL and build the tables? Believe me, this is not a manual job I'm only allowed one db (w/o upgrade), so I'll need to prefix the tables.

* Can it be dumped and reloaded w/ new passwords for the next year?

I do have phpMyAdmin access, but for me, that's like entering Shelob's lair.

...or maybe I can just do it the simple way and create a password-protected directory including a text file for each chapter