Fixing a website…all content is in themes

Hello there. I am helping a lab fix their wordpress site as I’m the only one around who has ever used wordpress (.com). The person who set up the site put all of the content into templates. The site functions just fine, but it makes it impossible for any of the lab members to edit their own content unless they are admin and have wordpress installed on their computers. (And honestly, that won’t happen with this crowd.) I would like to update the site so that all of the content is put back into the page (not the template) so that all members can be editor status and use visual to edit the contents.

My problem is that I have never used templates, so it would be wonderful if I could get a bit of clarification on a few things…
(1) I’m dreaming here, but is there a straightforward way to transfer the information from the templates to the pages without copy/pasting a million times?
(2) Any edits that I make in the pages currently do not show up, so it seems the template is overriding the page. How do I turn off or deactivate the templates? Can I do that to a subset of these templates or is it all-or-none?

If you have any suggestions on how to re-work this site, I’d appreciate it!