I am sure this is a newbie question, but are the beacons compatible with RFID cards? It seems like they are not, but wanted to be sure. If not, how would you suggest I get around this in order to hopefully use the existing cards with beacon tech? Keep in mind, I am not a coder, but have a team that can assist. I might just need things explained at a very rudimentary level 
What do you mean by compatible? That they can read RFID tags? Or they can be read by RFID readers?
Some beacons support NFC and can act as tags. They can be read by NFC enabled smartphones (external readers should also be able to scan them). Here is some tech info about it: https://developer.estimote.com/proximity/nfc/