I have a large website and I am trying to use Advanced Permissions to control access. I am running into an issue however. On the pages, I don't want users editing the sidebar blocks. However, I do want them to have access to the main content area block. Here's a snippet of the hierarchy:

Home
- Admissions
-- Graduate Admissions
--- Programs
--- Open Houses
--- FAQ

In this case I want Graduate Admissions to have access to its section. So I set the permissions on the Graduate Admissions page to:

Assign permissions: Manually
Subpage permissions: Inherit the permissions of this page
Edit Contents: Graduate Admissions was included

So now whenever I navigate the site as grad admissions, none of the pages are editable except the ones underneath Graduate Admissions. All is well so far.

If I edit one of the subpages:
http://www.usj.edu/admissions-financial-aid/graduate-admissions/faq...

There is information in the right sidebar that I don't want the user to edit:
Make it Happen
I Have More Questions

So I go into the Defaults for that Page Type and I set the permissions on the page to:

Assign Permissions by area of site hierarchy

On the sidebar block (the one I don't want them to edit) I Override the permissions and set them to:
Edit Area Contents and I exclude grad admissions

It doesn't work. I've tried numerous combinations of settings and nothing is working.

In a nutshell, I simply want to restrict access to certain block area sfor certain users/groups.

Any thoughts?