OP wrote:
"We’ve got it to boot in recovery mode but can’t erase the hard drive."
IMPORTANT QUESTION:
When you boot to recovery, are you booting to "the recovery partition", or are you booting to INTERNET recovery?
There's a BIG difference.
If you want to erase the internal drive, do this:
1. Boot to INTERNET recovery:
Command-OPTION-R
...at boot.
2. You'll need your wifi password, and the internet utilities will take a while to load.
3. Once the internet utilities are loaded, open disk utility.
4. VERY IMPORTANT: go to the view menu and choose "show all devices".
5. NOW look at the list on the left. You should see the physical hard drive as "the topmost item".
6. Click it and click erase. I believe you want "APFS, GUID partition format".
Does this work any better?