At first, the Gowens didn’t think too much of the sound. A month later, they’re desperately hoping to figure out how to make it go away.

Around the time SM East let out for summer, Matt Gowen and his family started noticing a high-pitched whirring that appeared to be coming from the north side of the school, spilling down Delmar Street to their house on 74th Terrace.

“It was like a low-level tornado siren, which is what caught my daughter’s attention because she’s terrified of storms,” Gowen said.

The family was used to noise from the school — marching band practices, PA announcements, sporting events — projecting toward their house. But they’d never heard anything like this before. Gowen said that when there’s ambient noise in the house or traffic driving by, the sound fades into the background. When things quiet down at night, though, it’s difficult to overlook.

“We usually love the sounds coming from that direction,” he said. “But now that it’s been going on for a month, 24 hours a day, it’s become really hard to ignore.”

Last week, district spokeswoman Leigh Anne Neal said the SM East operations and maintenance teams would be investigation the air cooled chiller equipment to see if they could identify the source.

“It’s like the distant relative who says he needs to crash at your place for a couple of days,” Gowen said. “Then you wake up a month later thinking, ‘Wait, what the heck are you still doing here?'”