Can this Verizon phone be activated with Page Plus service?

You need to ask Page Plus to be sure. Often, pre paid phones are impossible/harder to unlock or switch to a different carrier compared to non-pre paid phones. That's because the company selling a prepay phone is already discounting it because they expect to make up all of that by selling you minutes, so if you buy it but don't use it on their network, they lose money. To prevent that happening, they program these phones so that they ONLY ever work on their own prepay.

If that phone doesn't work out, another good place to get cheap basic phones is on eBay. Just look for a used Verizon phone that's not prepay and has a clean ESN (the clean ESN means the phone's network ID has never been listed as lost/stolen - phones with a bad ESN usually can't be activated).