On Wednesday, May 25, BPHS and IMS lost power at about 8:50 AM. Despite the outage, WiFi, some lights, and the PA system remained operable with backup power.

Other school operations however were greatly affected. The clocks, automatic water in the bathroom, and the majority of the lights remained inoperable.

Greatly affected was the newly opened Bean and Berry coffee shop in the cafeteria.

When asked how the power outage was affecting operations, the store attendant said, “We are no longer able to brew any hot coffee and with the refrigerator down we won’t be able to make cold drinks for very long.”

In an interview with marketing student and DECA competitor Sabrina Tatalias, she said Bean and Berry was “Still serving the school” throughout the outage.

Some classes were forced to suspend work until the power came on, but Mr. Kszastowski’s media production class was able to continue work despite the outage.

When asked how the students handled the outage, Mr Kszastowski said: “We were able to stay productive by improvising.  One of the students held his phone as a flashlight to the whiteboard as another wrote responses from the class on the board.  Even though students had to change how they normally worked, we were still productive.”

The blood drive in the South Gym was also affected by the outage.

The student coordinator of the blood drive said: “The blood drive has been greatly slowed down, all of the work usually done on the computers must be done manually now. We have many students backed up waiting for us to start again.”

Unaffected by the power outage was the Chromebook collection line.

When asked how the collection was affected by the outage, a Chromebook Guru said, “The collection is continuing as planned, we are completely unaffected by the outage.”