Digital BW, The Print

Hi,
I'm new to this group.  I have an interest in printing black and white
photos (taken with my digital camera), and I would like to ask for
suggestions about what printer/ink/paper to get, given my particular
circumstances.

I make short "photo essays" of children at my preschool; each is
composed of a series of pictures and text (spanning one to several
pages of standard-size paper) in which, for example, I try to capture
a child's involvement in an episode of play, or engagement in
problem-solving, or just experiencing daily life at school.  Each page
usually contains three or more photos, often of varying sizes; and a
line or two -- sometimes a paragraph or two -- of text.  

I arrange the photos and text using the page layout program, Ragtime.
 With Ragtime, I crop, and enlarge/shrink the photos to make the best
arrangement (Since Ragtime isn't a graphics program there's not much
besides this that I can do to the photos.  While I could do some
adjustments on the photos beforehand in a photo-editing program, I
really couldn't afford the time it would take to do this on each
individual photo)

While I'm not a professional photographer I do put a lot of care into
capturing the pictures (when the children are _not_ paying attention
to me and the camera), and into selecting and composing each series to
best tell the story and evoke the mood of the situation. I'm choosing
to print in black and white because I like it better.  

  To describe the quality I would like to acheive:  I definitely want
to get significantly better printouts than what I'm getting now from
my 600 dpi B&W laser printer; and I'd like to avoid the color cast I
remember getting when I printed grayscale on the HP photosmart printer
I had a couple years ago.  I'd like to acheive the quality you might
see in a photography book of black and white photos.  I also like the
idea of printing on paper like the photography books would use --
thin, smooth, somewhat shiny paper (somewhere in between plain,
everyday copy paper and thick heavy photo paper).

Does such a printer exist, that:

-prints B&W without ugly color casts (and without time-consuming
adjustments and having to experiment with printing and fine-tuning
each photo)

-approaches the quality of book-printed B&W photographs

-doesn't require the most expensive, photo-quality paper to get these
results

-does a decent job printing the text along with the photos

-costs maybe $100 to $300 (possibly more if it were a printer whose
supplies were especially cheap)

-is not extremely expensive to use.  "Extremely expensive," to me,
would be using the special Quad grayscale inks, in prefilled
cartridges, and printing on photo-quality paper.  (Bulk Quad ink that
I'd fill myself, and a mid-range paper, might be acceptable), 

           -------------------------
I realize I might have to compromise on some of the above . . .

There are a bunch of things that _don't_ matter much to me:  the speed
of the printing, what type of printer it is (laser or inkjet or
something else), whether or not it's capable of printing in color, how
fade-resistant the printouts are in the long run.

I'd greatly appreciate any suggestions of printer/ink/paper
combinations that are worth my considering.

-Susanna