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Building a quality auditorium has never come at a cheap price. And in today’s economy, a $750,000 minimum price tag just for sound, lighting, stage rigging and seats can seem exorbitant. “And that’s in a low construction cost area,” says David Kromm, president of Kromm Rikimaru and Johansen, an architectural firm in St. Louis, Mo., that has built several high school auditoriums. “Missouri has pretty low costs compared to Chicago,” which is the next biggest city in the area.
Schools that have built new auditoriums or upgraded existing ones in the past decade say the investment is worth every penny. For many, it becomes a community gathering place and an attraction to hold regional events that bring in cash. For others, it offers students a quality educational experience in their future profession. Take McEachern High School in Cobb County School District, just outside Atlanta. Using dollars from the public school’s trust fund, the district built in 1996 an 877-seat stand-alone auditorium on its campus that includes luxuries like an orchestra pit that can be raised or lowered, two rehearsal suites (one for instrumental, the other for vocal), a costume room, and a scene shop connected to a loading dock for professional scene deliveries.
Simply naming some of the equipment creates a sense of wonder. The computerized lighting control system has an NSI/Colortran 24/48 console with 250 Colortran dimmers. A Sony Multiscan rearscreen projection system is mounted on the back wall. That’s just a drop in the bucket of technology high school students here can get their hands on. After the first five years in operation, McEachern High School could boast 15 graduates who chose technical theater as a college major due to this auditorium, and amusement park Six Flags Over Georgia was hiring McEachern students to work part-time in its technical services division. It’s a good return on what was estimated to be a $5 million investment last decade, says technical director Dan Faulkner. “My only advice is to go for it and build the best you can build at the time,” he says. “What I see with a lot of high schools is that the new auditoriums all look the same—they get the same equipment and they are limited on what they an do. Don’t scrimp. If you’re going to do a fine arts program, do it right.”
Punchlist
High school auditoriums break down to four categories of choices for Kromm: coustics, lighting, the stage and the seats. A standard sound system must be connected well to the Internet, and video projection is necessary in order to allow users to work with any presentation format they eed. As administrators work their way through these issues, multipurpose is the key word.
Acoustics
Lemont High School in the Lemont Township (Ill.) High School District 210 added a high-tech auditorium to its existing building as part of a larger $29.6 million project that included classroom additions and football field improvements. Officials hired an acoustician from 2006 to 2008 to advise uperintendent Sandy Doebert and her team regarding the blueprints. They eventually chose to build the walls to a standard so audiences cannot hear a rainstorm while nside the auditorium. Officials also chose to install cloudlike materials floating from the ceiling as a disguised means of absorbing unwanted sound.
“It’s definitely expensive because of the technologies associated with it,” Doebert says. “What was important to us was making sure we were purchasing the performing arts center with the necessary equipment but not bells and whistles. That’s real easy to do because the world of theater technology can be very confusing” with all the details in a bid, she says.
"What I see with a lot of high schools is that the new auditoriums all look the same. ... Don't scrimp. If you're going to do a fine arts program, do it right." -Dan Faulkner, technical director, McEachern High School
To help draw the line between cool and crucial, Doebert not only hired experts to translate but called other superintendents who had been through similar construction projects for independent confirmation. “We had to do not only what was right for the auditorium but what was right for our consumers and community too,” she says.
The original sound system at McEachern’s auditorium has served the school well for 12 years now, but Faulkner has finally begun looking at upgrades. Don’t look for him to pay upgraded prices, however. He avors the used market, where he says he can get top-notch equipment at bargain basement prices. “I can take my budget from the trust and expand my capabilities that way. I get no county money to keep up the theater,” he notes.
