By Elora Brow
Staff Writer
The UCLA Blood Drive took place at Mira Costa High School on November 10th in the gym. Although the blood drive was a success with the amount of blood that was donated, there seemed to have been a lack of organization and efficiency.
The UCLA Blood Drive is a drive organized by ASB, put together to collect blood donations to help save the lives of many during surgery through transfusions. Mira Costa collected a total of 232 pints of blood in this one day.
The blood drive is a positive and beneficial foundation and in order to get more students to participate they should make it run as efficient as possible. The lack of efficiency expressed definitely would not have encouraged students to donate blood.
According to Sophomore blood donor Kara Milewski, it took three hours to donate blood when she only expected it to take one hour and she ended up missing both her math and science class after the office hours and fell behind in those classes. These activities should not have interfered with the student’s learning especially considering that the students were under the wrong impression of how long the donation would take.
According to Commissioner of Community Relations for ASB, Tyler Knudson, a big issue was that large amounts of students were flooding in all at once and because of this there were not enough nurses to help everyone quickly. This could have appeared discouraging to students and they may not have wanted to participate in order to avoid the chaos.
According to Commissioner of Community Relations for ASB, Kevin Vartan, having more nurses would have helped with the speed of the donations and more students would have possibly been able to donate blood throughout the day. Considering the school has so many students it would be fair and helpful if UCLA would have provided a specific number of nurses corresponding to the number of participants.
The problem with spreading the students out equally throughout the day is that some students may have tests or lectures that they cannot miss in a specific period. Although this would cause conflict with teachers as they would be missing large amounts of students in all of their classes, spreading the students out is necessary for the blood drive to move as quickly as possible.
There is a new agreement with teachers that there can be no interruptions to their classes that will cause a loss of learning time other than on the office hours day where periods are already lessened. Although this is completely understandable because of the already lost time, there should be certain exceptions for the teachers to adjust schedules on one day, such as the blood drive.
It would be helpful for ASB to be able to hold the blood drive on a day with full periods so that the largest amount of students possible can participate and not miss multiple classes as they did with shortened periods.
Overall, the blood drive is very beneficial as it does help save many lives, but this blood drive lacked organization because of the mass amounts of students in short periods of time with not enough nurses there to help move everything along quicker. If these problems were fixed then the blood drive would be efficient and successful.
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