Lights have been on in a Massachusetts school for more than a year because no one knows how to turn them off. And it is expensive

By Corky Siemaszko —

For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit 24 hours a day because the district can't turn off the building's nearly 7,000 lights.

The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago with the intention of saving money and energy.

But ever since the software that runs it crashed

costing taxpayers a fortune.

“We are very aware that this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent for finance for the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News.

"And we've been doing everything we can to fix this problem," he clarified.

The lights at Minnechaug Regional High School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts have been on since Aug. 24, 2021. Matt Nighswander / NBC News.

Osborne said it's hard to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly. "I would say the net impact is thousands of dollars a month on average, but not tens of thousands." , he concluded.

This is, in part, because the school uses high-efficiency LED and fluorescent light bulbs.

And, where possible, teachers have manually removed light bulbs from classroom fixtures, while staff have turned off switches not connected to the system to turn off some of the outdoor lighting.

Still, having the lights on in Minnechaug all the time is a conspicuous waste of taxpayer money, Wilbraham council members said in an Aug. 8, 2022 letter to members of the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District.

“The image it projects is wasteful at a time when many families in the communities served by the district are struggling with their own energy costs,” they wrote.

But there is hope on the horizon that Minnechaug's lights will go out soon.

Paul Mustone, president of Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation during the February holidays.

“And yes, there will be a remote control switch so this doesn't happen again,” said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.

A classroom remains lit at night at the Minnechaug Regional Institute.Matt Nighswander/NBC News

Minnechaug is the only high school in its district, serving 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden.

The original building, which dates to 1959, was replaced with the current 248,000-square-foot structure in 2012.

One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” that works with software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights.

The system was designed to save energy—and therefore money—by automatically adjusting the lights.

But in August 2021, school staff noticed that the lights weren't dimming during the day and were burning at night. “The lighting system was set to default,” Osborne said, “and the system's default position is the lights are on."

Lilli DiGrande wrote an article for the institute's news website about the lights at the institute in November 2021.Matt Nighswander / NBC News

They contacted the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the school was built, Osborne said.

When the company's current owner, Reflex Lighting, was finally located, it took several weeks before Reflex Lighting was able to find anyone familiar with the lighting system, he said.

Meanwhile, Lilli DiGrande, who is now a 16-year-old student and co-editor of The Smoke Signal, the school newspaper, published an article on November 3, 2021 with the headline “What About the Lights?”

"Teachers were complaining because they couldn't dim the lights to project videos and movies onto the blackboard," DiGrande told NBC News.

“Teachers are now trying to get around it by unscrewing the light bulbs.

But the lights seem to be on everywhere in the school,” he added.

Soon, Wilbraham councilors began receiving complaints from residents.

“Selectmen Board members have received, and continue to receive, complaints about the lights being left on at night at Minnechaug Regional High School,” they wrote in their Aug. 8, 2022 letter. referenced are classroom lights, not exterior lights.

There is a significant amount of concern expressed by citizens that this is a waste of energy and, in turn, taxpayer dollars."

The municipal officials added that "this matter may be of lesser cost or importance in the general operation of the District, but it is, unfortunately, visible."

Osborne, along with school superintendent John Provost, assured city leaders that they had been working on the problem.

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“After many weeks of effort, we were provided with a rough estimate of over $1.2 million to comparably replace the entire system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in an Aug. 26, 2022, response.

That estimate was from Reflex Lighting, Osborne told NBC News.

But with the pandemic in full swing, the contractor wouldn't have been able to start doing the work until the following summer, Osborne said.

So Osborne and Provost, in their letter to city officials, wrote that they hired a software consultant to see if it would be possible to "patch the system" to override the default system.

And when that proved unfeasible, they looked into installing simple timers or even an on/off switch.

“Ultimately this was deemed not possible and the district turned to looking at physical solutions that retained some of the energy saving intent of the original lighting management system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in their response.

Osborne said they had no choice but to go back to Reflex Lighting and, with the help of the company's electrical engineers, came up with what he described as a "piecemeal" approach to solving the problem by replacing the server, control boards lighting control and other hardware.

Parts were ordered in November 2021 and repair work was due to start in February 2022.

But the replacement main server wasn't delivered to Wilbraham until March 2022, which Osborne and Provost described in their letter to city leaders as "relatively on schedule."

“It was very frustrating, but we were dealing with the pandemic and supply chain issues,” Osborne said.

Osborne and Provost also reported that “remaining equipment has been ordered multiple times” and the district received a new delivery date of October 14, 2022.

“While we are hopeful that this will come to pass, we are of course skeptical,” they wrote.

"So for now, the lights are stuck."

It turned out that they were right to be skeptical.

Christmas 2022 passed and the replacement parts did not arrive and the lights were still on in Minnechaug.

“The final transition of the lighting system did not occur over the holidays as expected because our vendor contacted us on the last day of school to reschedule the transition work,” Osborne said in a subsequent January 3 letter to the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee.

“This was surprising and disappointing for us – we had this date locked in with Reflex since October.”

Now, Osborne said, "we don't expect them to come until February, but we are pushing to do it sooner."

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But trust that waiting was the right decision.

“We could have accepted the offer of $1.2 million to boot up the system and start over immediately, but I suspect we would be in the same situation,” he said.

“The way I see it, there was no alternative,” he added.

Mustone said the pandemic essentially shut down factories in China that make the components they need for this kind of work, and that it's much cheaper to build things there, but many American companies are now paying the price.

“I've been at this for 42 years and I've never seen this kind of supply chain disruption,” he said.

"We made a deal with the devil by moving the factories to China," he said.