Disallow user access to system preferences?

Hi everyone,
I've been working in a university lab getting 30 macs in top shape and I would like to make sure nothing is changed by students, so I want to disable access to system preferences for the managed student user account. I've tried doing this through parental controls, however this has caused some problems when launching other applications (specifically Chrome and adobe creative cloud, perhaps there are others). Disabling access to system preferences seems to also also disable access to some other key services that cannot be managed directly in parental controls. Does anyone know a solution? I know this can also be done in terminal, however that isn't an option as occasionally an administrator may need to authenticate access to system preferences without having to launch terminal. Any ideas?

Intell said:

Isn't there an option in the Security preference pane that requires an admin user account to unlock each preference pane?

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That only applies to preference panes with a lock. I don't want unauthorized users to be able to access any preference panes (including desktop/screensaver, mission control, etc.)

quackers82 said:

We use Profile Manager to do this on our lab computers, which is part of the Apple Server stuff.

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We do have a mac mini server in the labs, but we don't manage users with it. I don't know a whole lot about OS X Server, would we have greater control over users if they were managed over the network? Would that sacrifice performance at all? All the computers are for intense graphic and video work.