Ever since the district administration decided to upgrade the lights throughout the building, they’ve saved the school money and they have one new feature compared to the old standard lights. These LED lights have the ability to change in brightness. 

“A lot of it is just to save on electricity you know,” Assistant Principal Jeff Thorne said. “There’s a lot of places that we put in motion sensor lights and stuff like that so that they turn themselves on and turn themselves off on a timer. So the main thing is just to save money.”

The lights took quite a while to change out and they’re still not done with the whole building yet. When the people come in to change out the lights, usually nobody knows about it. The committee has been changing out the lights for a couple of months now, who knows when they’ll be done.

 “They’re still in the process of doing that. So it’s probably been a couple months that they’ve been working on it and what they do is they work at night. So they come in and they have different areas within the school and they’ve been pretty smooth committees, you really don’t see a whole lot of it,” Thorne said.

When planning to change out the lights in the building, it was a group decision. Everyone put their word in on it. 

“I think ultimately I brought it up to our CO team when I was initially hired here two years ago and we chose to make that a big part of our bond issue that we passed just in April a few months ago,” Director of Facilities Josh Schaffer said. “Especially seeing how much money can be saved by installing those.” 

The installation of the lights cost a lot of money, it was crazy expensive just to install the light interior.

“I guess it was about $800,000. For just the lighting interior,” Schaffer said.

The new LED lights should be all through the building by the end of December. 

“We will actually be wrapping up here, somewhat soon. We’re coming around the corner with our substantial completion. Now we are looking to be done in that building completely by the end of the calendar year end of December,” Schaffer said.

They started putting the lights in this summer and it seems they have made a lot of progress since then. 

“They started this summer, so this was a part of the bond issue that we passed last April. Part of that was our lighting, this building was all redone in the mid 90s you know, so it’s time for us to start with more efficient, energy efficient, and better lights,” Principal Jeff Walker said.