I would move the navigation to the left side, it is standard and there are loads of usability studies showing that is the easiest to navigate.
Two sites I have to use for top-level pages at work are:
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp
validates urls to make sure they meet accessibility requirements (if you are doing this for a state school you may want to do this as a cya)
validates urls so that most any browser should see the info the way you planned it to look. There may be one extra tag you need on your pages, but they explain it pretty well.
I would also make better use of tables to control where the info ends up on the page.