I'm gonna go out on a limb here and speculate that the school and town bureaucracy made a really, really bad decision and cheaped out when they should have purchased from a reliable and stable source.

School administrations are not famous for their intelligent spending practices; our local small town (15,000 pop) HS had a huge battle spending over $70 million on a new HS in the 90s. When it was done and I went to the big open house, I saw huge round atrium (I think round rooms cost extra?), with cabinets in the offices made from flimsy chipboard that you'd find in cheap home construction, and some other bad choices as well.