I think some companies see 'Public School' in the install
line and get $$$ in the eyes.
Actually, many good companies see "public school" and run! A very common scenario is that the audio and lighting get lumped in under the electrical. So the Electrical Engineer, who may not have planned on designing those systems and may even find themselves essentially forced into dealing with these systems, gets a dealer or rep to 'design' the specialty systems for free, getting exactly the value put into it (nothing). That then gets awarded to the bidder with the lowest price, often the same party that put the design together and specified the
system such that only they have a real shot at it, who then do nothing more than they absolutely have to.
Or it can be like one public school I had where the the school thought it was a good idea to have everything from security to audio under one 'low
voltage' Contractor, so they awarded the project to a firm who may have been well qualified for security and
CCTV but whose audio experience went about as far as school classroom PA systems. They then tried to substitute PA and intercom equipment for just about every item in the
theatre sound
system. When they realized they weren't going to get away with that type of thing, in order to hold on to the rest of the contract they ended up subcontracting someone who had some idea of what they were doing, even though they did so at a loss. The sad thing was that since they did not have a TD hired when this happened, if there hadn't been a Consultant involved then nobody probably would have any idea of the difference and the school probably would have ended up with a nice, big new theater with a Bogen PA
system in it.
On another project, we designed a nice little
system for a
theatre renovation in a public school and although what we did was nothing fancy at all, I ended up having to defend our design to a school board that wanted to put in the same single, omni
speaker system with a
mixer/amp that they had used in the gym. The school even sent us the equipment list from the gym PA
system and told us to design around that, at which
point we told them we could not do that since we would be liable and what they were asking would not work. We said that they could bid what we designed with us involved or do whatever they wanted but without us being part of it. But the dealer that sold the gym
system was happy to sell them the same thing for a
theatre.
They're certainly not all this bad, I've seen public schools where things worked out quite well, but I will say that the worst design and bid documents I've seen have been for public school
theatre and
auditorium audio systems.