After some more experimentation I found that indeed
does turn off numlock. Granted this wasn't a trivial feat to accomplish without being able to use the letter "o" on my keyboard (as it becomes the number 6 with numlock on).
I eventually wrote a shell script for my ~/bin directory, which I called "wwww" (since the letter w is not effected by the status of numlock) that essentially just invoked the command above.
Then, once I could boot into KDE and use all my keys, I went to
system settings -> advanced -> autostart -> where I could enter the same command to be started on starting KDE.