For the past 30 years, the annual CHS Senate blood drive has partnered with Versiti Blood Center to help local hospitals collect as many blood donations as possible. Students who are 16 years old or older and not participating in a CHS fall sport are eligible to sign up. Additionally, students who are 16 years old are required to sign the parental consent form, which can be found at the blood drive table at lunch.

According to Fatima Idrees, Senate member and junior, Indiana is currently in a critical blood shortage.

Idrees said, “At the moment, hospitals need donations in order to perform life-saving surgeries. (Senate’s) blood drive is the largest one in Indiana so many surgeries happening in the area are planned around it.”

Senate sponsor Michelle Foutz said the blood drive is beneficial to the community.

She said, “I know there are other ways that students give back to their community, but what makes this different is that they don’t have to give money and comparatively, it’s not a lot of time. Overall, the benefit to the community is huge because (students are) saving lives.”

For junior Will Titus, it will be his first time participating in the blood drive.

“I signed up because there was a need for help and so I signed up to help,” he said.

Idrees said the main goal of the event is to increase donations to help benefit the hospitals.

“We really want to advocate for those in need of blood donations and trying to up the number of donors is our main objective to benefit our local hospitals and grow the event,” she said.

However, many students who sign up for the blood drive may not be able to donate blood due to unexpected obstacles.

“We would love to get 250 to 275 students signed up because we know that on the day of the blood drive, there will be students who are absent, sick, deferred because they don’t weigh enough, or taking a certain medication that would prevent them from removing blood,” Foutz said. “There could be 50 deferrals on the day of the blood drive so we want to get as many people signed up as we can; our goal is to get 150 units of blood on the day of the drive.”

After the blood donation, participants will be taken to an area where they will be given food and drink. Then, participants will sit for around ten minutes and go back to class with a pass. 

“I’m looking forward to actually working the blood drive,” Idrees said. “I am a co-chair of the committee this year so I am extremely excited to experience how the event runs and see if we hit our goal of collecting units of blood.”

To sign up for the blood drive, click here. 

This story has been updated to include photos of the event.