Evidently, few commenters read the article, so...

The title is misleading. They are using circuit breakers, and/or removing lighting elements where they can. But it's obviously not a solution. Imagine if all the appliances in your kitchen were either on, or off, depending on a circuit breaker in another room.

The problem is that the software that controls the lights is broken, and evidently, they think they need "parts from China" to fix it, but it took weeks to find a guy familiar with the system.

That's amazingly fucked up. Software should not need "parts from China" to be fixed. Didn't they get any documentation with it? Hell, there are probably students at that school who could fix the software, but evidently nobody even knows that you don't fix software with "parts from China".

FWIW, there are some LED contractors that live near me, and I will ask the if they know about this case. Maybe they have some "parts from China". Lord knows, we Americans just aren't smart enough to make our own technology. /s