You should update your post and give examples of what you're storing. Test scores, word docs?
Anyways, OP has given so little info it seems a bit of a waste that they have received so many long replies without even knowing what the problem is.
I know we can't build what we need from scratch, and I know that we need something more sophisticated than a NAS- we don't want to invest the capital and time to create an inhouse technology stack, we use google apps for our student and staff accounts and document hosting, and it seems like our data storage needs to be a similar kind of managed database product which allows our office staff to input new records through internal web forms and similar approachable tools.