County Prep

Ensuring that students at the Hudson County School of Technology have the best facilities to learn in, are at the heart of the recent upgrades made to their technology and recording arts departments. The school, based in Secaucus, NJ, boasts a newly renovated campus that took two and a half years to complete, replete with seventy new state of the art class rooms.  The campus is a vocational magnet school, and advanced technological resources are the central focus for this new renovation. 

The design and construction were overseen by the Hudson County Improvement Authority,  in partnership with DMR Architects.  RSC Architects were important in helping cross over certain aspects of the team, while MAST Construction were on board as general contractors. Criterion Acoustics were in charge of overseeing AV innovation and applications. The implementation of the AV technologies were particularly important on this build, as they are a key component of modern education.  Dave Kotch, presided over all aspects of AV system design and implementation.  The new campus has AV systems for the campus recording studio, concert hall, black box theater, video production studio, a digital production lab, and a newly built state of the art gymnasium.  These were implemented and installed with Masque Sound.  Kotch worked closely with the team to make sure that everything met professional level standards, ensuring that students are learning in real, world class systems and environments. The design and planning took around two years, as Kotch told Sound and Communications, in their May issue, which featured the project, and the teams involved.  Kotch’s AV system design also called for Blackmagic Design Smart Videohubs, which makes the campus’ systems current with industry standards. For the theater, L-Acoustics ARCS Focus speaker arrays, with a a center array of L-Acoustics Kiva II speakers were part of Kotch’s design- ensuring complete coverage. 

During the construction, a challenge that the team faced was having to open walls to secure structural mount points for the correct location of the speakers. Kotch’s visionary design was both instrumental in ensuring great sound, but also kept the project on task with budget guidelines. Many of Kotch’s designs were also planned with a level of user flexibility in mind, making each workstation and set up accessible in a variety of modes for skilled and unskilled operators, making them perfectly suited to an educational establishment. This is a key feature for this type of project because not only did the campus need to meet professional standards, but it needed to be both operable and accessible to all stages of student learning.

The campus, which features many technological resources for students, including a performing arts theater, was built with LEED Environmental energy proficiency in mind- taking great care to ensure the highest possible standards were met for sustainability.  The campus is also  Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant, make the campus an accessible learning environment for all students, including those with hearing impairments.

Students in the area will now have access to incredible facilities to foster hands on training and an advanced vocational curriculum.  An environmentally friendly and sustainable build out ensures that the facilities created will be in use for many years to come, with the flexibility to make needed technological upgrades over time.

By ensuring that all the teams involved in this large scale, meaningful project were able to facilitate both a technological and environmentally sound set of renovations; the campus can, along with a cohort of trusted educators, focus on fostering the highest level of cutting-edge educational experiences for generations to come.