Palo Alto High School students can donate blood or volunteer to help out at the Key Club spring blood drive in the small gym on Monday, May 3.
The blood drive will be held from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and students who wish to participate will need their teacher’s permission to be excused from class, although people may also donate blood during lunch and brunch.
Blood donors must be at least 16 years old, weigh at least 110 lbs, be healthy and cannot have donated blood less than eight weeks prior to the event, according to sophomore Alex Liu, who is co-chairing the event.
Sign-up sheets for blood donors can be found in the math resource center and room 214. Students should turn in the sign-up sheets to Liu or junior co-chair Pierre Bourbonnais, according to Liu. Public sign-up sheets can be found in the Academic Resource Center.
Students who are under the age of 18 must bring a permission form on the day of the blood drive.
Liu said that there are many benefits to donating blood.
“Donors not only get the satisfaction that they’ve given blood that will save lives, but they also get to eat free food,” said Liu.
Students may also earn community service hours by volunteering at the blood drive, Liu said. They may begin by recruiting at least four blood donors.
“Anyone can join [to volunteer],” Liu said. “Just turn the form into either me, Pierre Bourbonnais, or [junior] Kevin Hu.”
Key club aims to collect as much blood as possible for the Stanford Blood Center, as the center depends on donors such as Paly students to replenish its supplies, according to Bourbonnais.
Bourbonnais hopes to make this year’s blood drive even more successful than last semester’s.
“Despite our goal, it is also highly imperative that the process remains orderly, that none of the donors get contaminated or injured and that the donation appointments are well spread out so that donors do not end up waiting an hour to donate, which is what happened last year,” Bourbonnais said.
Key Club hopes to receive between 150 and 200 donors, according to Bourbonnais, though he also mentioned that the Advanced Placement testing schedule may prevent it from meeting its goal.
“It would be nice if we could have anywhere between 150 and 200 donate, since we had over a hundred donors for the fall blood drive last year,” Bourbonnais said. “Yet, despite our efforts to increase attendance, we must also take into consideration that the blood drive is on the same day as the AP French Language Test and some students will not be able to donate as a consequence of that.”