Stay on Pages not working

Hello,

I am having to recreate a document I had in indesign in pages, and one thing I'm struggling with is that there seems to be no way to arrange text boxes anywhere without them moving around.

There's also this large amount of padding in the text boxes that I can't figure out how to get rid of, but when I try to move text boxes closer together to look the way I want the text moves.

I have enabled the "stay on page" that has been suggested to solve this problem, but that does nothing. The text still moves around. I have even locked the text blocks then try to position one closer and the locked boxed text still moves.