While private schools and charter schools get a lot of media buzz, public schools aren’t standing still. One shining example is the Hudson County Schools of Technology (HCST), a New Jersey public school district. Having outgrown its main campus in North Bergen, HCST recently completed construction of a new main facility on the 20-acre Frank J. Gargiulo Campus in Secaucus, a few miles away. The 350,000 sq ft campus, built in only 27 months at a cost of $154 million, houses High Tech High School, Knowledge and Advanced Skills Prep, and Hudson Technical, in addition to HCST.
The HCST building incorporates advanced AV technology, designed and installed by East Rutherford-based Masque Sound, with Symetrix Edge DSPs at the heart of the system. “The school is all new construction, focused on technology,” began Keith Caggiano, Senior Project Manager for Masque. “Our portion of it encompassed a 325-seat auditorium, a 120-seat black box theatre, a gymnasium, a recording studio, and a TV production studio, the majority of which had system processing by Symetrix.”
“The gym is for large gatherings, commencements, pep rallies, things of that nature,” reported Matt Peskie, Masque’s Installations Department Manager. “It has a large project screen and enough PA to support everybody in the program with wireless mics. The auditorium is more for production, so it has a lot more wireless mics, some backstage displays, and a projection screen for slide presentations. The recording studio is for straight-up audio recording, and the TV production studio is doing both audio and video recording. The black box theater is, of course, the ultimate flexible space that can be used for any kind of production, plus they have a few podcast studios.”
