Juliette Deutsch, social media director

ASB teamed up with UCLA for its annual blood drive on April 1. However, due to an unexpected illness among staff members, students were turned away from donating blood.

“Basically what happened is the UCLA blood drive told us that six of their staff members came down with an illness and were unable to come down this morning,” sophomore Justin Friedman said. “We’ve just been spacing out when we accept people. We had to close down a couple of times so that we could get caught up.”
ASB members, according to Friedman, worked to their best ability and used all the available staff.
“Of course there was nothing we could do to prevent it,” Friedman said. “Next year we just have to make sure to have back up and try to confirm more with UCLA to have people fill in.”
Every year, ASB sets out to collect 190 units of blood. However, due to the unexpected shortage of staff, it was unable to fulfill its goal.
“Our class goal is to have 300 sign ups to fulfill the 190 units of blood goal. Due to the short staff  we had to turn students away which hurt our goal of getting 190 units of blood,” sophomore Isaac Spector said.
“This year we had 298 sign ups plus walkins, but because of the whole dilemma with understaffing there were many people we had to turn away because we didn’t have space for them,” Spector said.
UCLA staff members were not available to comment due to the hospital’s privacy policy.