Multiple Blogs for a school

Hi all.

I work for a school and would like some advice on setting up Word Press.

I have been asked to set up a blogging system for our school. I need to be able to import around 600+ users to start with. I need each user to have a subdirectory with his/her own blog in it. It all needs to run off the one WordPress installation though…

Does anyone have any tips or instructions on how to do this?

So far I have Word Press running on our LAMPP server. I have found a plugin that allows me to import users from .csv files. I still have not found out how to set each user up with a subdirectory though…

We want it to run like wordpress.com does.

Any help would be really cool. Oh and one last thing, does anyone know of a good template developer for wordpress? I have been given a budget and would like a custom template made.

Thanks

John