Six seniors at the Preuss School at the University of California, San Diego have teamed up to form Students for Organ Donations, the first West Coast high school chapter and one of only four in the country whose mission is to educate about organ donation and rally possible donors. For their efforts the students have been selected to receive the State Farm Good Neighbor Service-Learning Award, administered by Youth Service America and funded by State Farm.

The $1,000 grant will be used to set up a high school student website for organ donation, as well as outreach activities on organ donation in April during National and Global Youth Service Day (N&GYSD), according to Preuss Students for Organ Donations spokesperson Christopher Khavarian.

N&GYSD, the largest service event in the world, mobilizes youth to identify and address the needs of their communities through service.

“As one of 100 grant winners, the Preuss School project was chosen out of over 300 applicants from across the United States, for its leadership and commitment to engage youth in service,” said Julie Mancuso, Youth Service America grants manager, in announcing the Preuss School grant.

Khavarian is a charter member of the Preuss School, now in his seventh year there. He hopes to go on to either Stanford or Princeton, major in biological sciences and eventually become a doctor. Specialty? What else? Transplant surgery.

Teaming up with Khavarian to create Students for Organ Donations are seniors Christina Nguyen, Giang Pham, Jennifer Vo, Brigitte Rubidoux, and Anh Nguyen. Their project is the product of the Service Learning Class which each Preuss senior takes and in which the students are directed to develop a project to benefit the community, write a team research paper and apply for a grant to fund the project. The class is taught by Preuss School principal Doris Alvarez and Jan Gabay.

Among other Service Learning Class projects are 1) working as volunteers with the AIDS Clinic in San Ysidro and helping stage a fund-raising event; 2) forming a Make-a-Wish Club on campus to raise money to fund one Make-a-Wish recipient; 3) doing a disaster preparedness workshop in the community and presenting materials on how to be prepared as a family, and 4) teaching a group of fifth grade students various art, dance, and drama projects on Friday mornings.

Khavarian and his teammates are well studied on organ donation statistics gleaned from researching the topic and from working with Lifesharing Community Organ and Tissue Donation, known simply as Lifesharing, one of 58 regional non-profit organizations dedicated to the life saving and life enhancing benefits of organ and tissue donation.

According to Lifesharing, founded in 1984 as a division of UCSD Medical Center, last year 289 people locally received organ transplants and approximately 15,000 were helped by tissue donations

Students for Organ Donations hopes to help build upon those successes.

“We wanted to create a high school program to educate and raise awareness of the importance of organ donation,” Khavarian said, “and also help clear up misconceptions.”

Among the misconceptions Khavarian has noted from the group’s research concern religion, preferential treatment, and dedicated care.

• “People of the Catholic faith may feel the church does not support organ donation,” Khavarian said. “The Pope is a registered organ donor. And most religious denominations support it as the choice of free will.”
• Preferential treatment for the rich and famous. “There are many determining factors for organ donation and it must be very specific,” said Khavarian, “ for example the size of the organ, the size of the person in need, the blood type, the need urgency of the individual and so on.”
• That doctors won’t fight to save a life knowing the person is an organ donor. “The doctors fight every bit as hard to save the life, to keep the person alive and every part of him intact. When that fails, then the people from Lifesharing explain organ donation.”

Khavarian said that the Preuss Students for Organ Donation has already signed up 150 people as organ donors. The group also wants to help other schools in the county start chapters. It is promoting the online registry, donatelifecalifornia.org, where a person can sign up to donate organs or not to donate organs.

An encyclopedia of statistics from his Lifesharing research, Khavarian says that one person, one donor, can help 58 people. This breaks down to saving the lives of eight people through organ donations and tissue donations that could enhance the lives of 50 people.

Also, said Khavarian, “on an average 18 people die daily waiting for a donor organ and every 13 minutes a new name is added to the national registry of people who need organ transplants.”

Media Contact: Jan Jennings (858) 822-1684.