District Administration - December 2008 - (Page 34)

The orchestra at McEachern High School in the Cobb County (Ga.) School District practices in the new auditorium where the pit can be raised or lowered. An outside view of the performing arts facility at McEachern High. Building the Best Auditorium “That gets pretty expensive to fix, all because kids wanted to see how much they could crank up the sound system.” —Bob Anderson, director of plant operations, Tempe (Ariz.) Union High School District Tempe (Ariz.) Union High School District, sees with upscale lighting and sound choices comes down to human nature. “If you don’t have good supervision, it doesn’t take much for students to start plugging things into the wrong holes and overloading the circuits until they blow out the boards,” he says. “That gets pretty expensive to fix, all because kids wanted to see how much they could crank up the sound system.” He would know, since the district has built six brand new state-of-the-art auditoriums in two decades. SeatS In previous generations, schools could get by with a 20- or even 18-inch seat, but with the American population’s larger physical size these days, comfortable seating means 22-inch seats and three feet of walking space between the back of one row and the seat pan in the next. But high school auditorium seats still don’t recline, and “administrators aren’t asking for cup holders and other fancy add-ons like that,” Kromm explains. 34 December 2008 Even today’s ordinary, padded seats were an improvement for Neosho High School. Because the previous seats were wooden— with many of them cracked—and creaky, Page made this the second non-negotiable category on his list. “There was more noise going on from the chairs creaking, people moving and the seats slamming up when they stood at our school plays,” he says. Changing to metal frames, which don’t creak, alone has been a big hit with audiences in this small town near Missouri’s western border. If faculty and staff at McEachern High School have any regrets about the school’s auditorium, it’s that all of the seats were placed into one facility. “When you do a play like Mr. Roberts and only get 200 people in an 800-seat auditorium, it looks empty,” Faulkner explains. If he could have a do-over, he’d build an auxiliary stage off to the side for smaller audiences. Tom Roth, the senior designer at Darien, Ill.-based Wight & Co., who was part of Lemont’s architect team, solved the seating problem by designing a balcony to split the audience capacity. The school can open this section if the audience numbers require it, or work with just the main floor for more intimate settings. Still, Superintendent Doebert says one regret is that they couldn’t find a way District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - December 2008

District Administration - December 2008
Contents
Editor’s Letter
News Update
College Preparatory
Security
Technology
District Profile
Administrator Profile
DA Web Seminars
Desperately Seeking Special Ed Teachers
Special Education’s Challenges
Building the Best Auditorium
Leading the Way
Righting the Writing Process
Sharpening a District’s Leadership Model
TCEA
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
New Products
Problem Solution
Professional Opinion
Research Center
Calendar of Events
Online Edge

District Administration - December 2008