Have you considered creating sub-sites under your publishing  site?

You can have each person be the owner of a sub-site and it's pages.

Depending on what you want to do, there are ways to display links on
the top level site  to the pages  in the sub-sites.

Giving those individuals their own subsites isn't really an option
here. They're having issues committing to handling their own pages,
let alone all of the stuff that comes with sites. I should have
stipulated that in the opening post. Creating subsites is not an
option.

After some playing in my DEV environment I figured I'd post my
resolution, and then folks can respond if there would be a different
way to do this.

The issue  was that the individual didn't have the correct level  of
access in the pages  document library  and this was preventing the
Page Editing Toolbar from appearing. To give  the individual the
relevant permissions I created a new permission  level named Page
Owner with the following levels:
- List Permissions: Edit Items, Delete Items, View Items, Open
Items, View Versions, Delete Versions, View Application Pages
- site  Permissions: View Pages, Open

I then created a group (page Owners) with access  to the Pages
document library, containing those users that would own pages, and
gave this group the page  Owner permission level.

After that, I broke inheritance for each of the pages in the Pages
library, removed the Page Owners group (as they were there cause of
inheritance), and added the spcific user  that I wanted to "own" the
page.

The above allows the user to have a P.E.T on their page, but not
have any other level of access to modify the Pages doc lib.