Static front page help

Hope this is the right forum.

OK, so the site still needs to be upgraded from WP 2.2 (backing up the site has taken a couple days to download), but this is the site in question: https://borderlinecollective.org/.

Basically I’m wondering if it’s possible to remove all the blog-type stuff from the front page and make a regular front page WHILE INCLUDING the most recent post text (no sidebar links to posts). So right now, there are 5 recent posts under the About blurb which I assume is some type of text widget (I’m new at WP, bear with me). And then pages on the left bar, I can see those in the dashboard as well. But what I want is a mostly static front page that I can create separately but somehow include just the most recent post below the intro info, and then link to a “news” link that will be the real blog.

Does that make sense? If there were no need for the most recent post I would probably just copy the CSS of whatever theme I change to when I upgrade and make a page based on that…but the shop really wants that most recent news item to post and I can’t have them do it manually (and I don’t have time to). Is there still a way to make this page separately (I have the FTP info for this site), and then is there some way to create a section that links to whatever’s being posted on WordPress?

Please advise…thanks so much.