As Junior Estella Dickens was walking through the cafeteria last Wednesday, she heard a loud beeping noise followed by all the lights turning off. The pitch darkness, she says, prompted a “fight-or-flight” reaction, with some students attempting to leave the cafeteria as quickly as possible and others initiating altercations with nearby janitors, who claimed to have nothing to do with the incident.

“I couldn’t see anything,” Dickens said. “I stepped on something squishy and I don’t know if it was a person, a banana or some other God-awful object. I honestly don’t know which is worse.”

This incident is part of a new electricity policy at SHS in which the power is cut schoolwide after 4 p.m. to save money. SHS Technical Coordinator Shelley Hobbs says the policy will be more helpful than harmful because “not that many” extracurricular activities need power to continue operating.

“Most of the sports teams can just practice outside, and I’ve already provided a solution to activities like band or the fall musical,” Hobbs said. “I personally delivered a box of candles to the students. You should’ve seen the excitement, especially when they saw the lanterns!”

The number of candles and lanterns that each extracurricular receives, according to Hobbs, is based on a predetermined “level of importance.” The checkers club, for example, was given a single, half-melted candle, while the fall musical cast received a fresh box.

“The power loss has been a difficult adjustment, but I think we can make it work,” SHS Musical Director Jenny Griffin said. “It really gives us that Phantom of the Opera feel, which isn’t exactly what we were going for, but it’s whatever.”

Hobbs says other money saving ideas are being considered, including a limit on the number of toilet flushes for each student. According to Hobbs, students would be given an “extremely generous” two flushes per day.