West Ranch HS Juniors Donate Face Shields to Essential Workers

Face shields are entirely custom-designed and manufactured by students
Following the shut-down of schools, students from West Ranch High School (WRHS) in Santa Clarita decided to do something productive to help essential workers. WRHS juniors Kevin Gillespie, Shaden Nasr, Matthew Chan, Rachel Gim and David Gee are spending their quarantine time manufacturing and distributing custom-designed face shields.
“We felt powerless as our school closed-down and the initial stay-at-home orders were put in place,” said the WRHS students in a letter and added, “We wanted to do something to help and realized that two of us have 3D printers. One thing led to another, and we wound up designing our own face shield by applying concepts of value engineering, optimizing convenience and reusability.”
Thus, they started their group, Open-Source Print and Protect (OPP), on April 7th, a 100 percent teen-initiated and -run organization — no teachers or adults.
“In less than a month—between our online schoolwork, eating and sleeping—the four of us have manufactured and delivered about 418 face shields to 23 facilities—completely free of charge,” the group said.
OPP’s face shield’s advantage is that a new visor can easily be created with a three hole-punch and transparencies (such as laminate of project film). The inspiration for their hole-punch face shield frame came from other models such as the Prusa RC3 and 3DVerkstan. While they do believe that these online models were great, OPP built their shields to create a more convenient model without sacrificing strength and comfort.
Recipients of OPP’s custom-designed face shield include hospitals such as USC Medical Center, Cedars-Sinai, and Kaiser Permanente; as well as the Los Angeles County Health Department; urgent care providers, private practices, and senior centers. They also recently donated masks to a local dentist who was providing emergency dental care, but was unable to procure any masks.
OPP has also partnered up with Skye Bottle led by another WRHS junior, Tristan Manalang. With every purchase of Skye Bottle, a portion of the proceeds will benefit OPP. (For more information about Skye Bottle, please contact skyebottle@gmail.com or follow on Instagram and Facebook, @skyebottle.)
OPP’s goal is to distribute at least 1,000 face shields to essential workers in the Los Angeles area. At present, it takes 55 minutes to produce one mask at the price of $1.70 and OPP shared that raising funds will help them meet this goal and even lower the cost of the shield.
To get to this goal, they started a GoFundMe (www.gofundme.com/f/printandprotect) campaign and have already raised $1,300 to fund their efforts. OPP is also hoping to increase production by recruiting others, buying more materials, and continuing to decrease production time so they can deliver to more facilities.
Any leftover funds will be donated to COVID-19 related charities.
“We want to invite other teens to join our effort and help protect as many people as we can from COVID-19 right now,” OPP said. “We’ve gone from feeling powerless to feeling like we are making a meaningful difference for our essential workers.”
For more information, visit our website at www.printandprotect.org or our Facebook & Instagram pages, both @printandprotect.