Orange Grove High School tops Jim Wells County blood drive honors

Orange Grove High School helped push more than 1,200 units of blood into the Coastal Bend supply, a haul that made the Jim Wells County campus the top school in the region’s High School Hero program. In a county where school pride often centers on athletics or academics, that number carried a sharper public-health meaning: it represented blood available for surgeries, trauma cases and emergency care across South Texas.

The Coastal Bend Blood Bank honored more than 50 schools at a luncheon at Mansion Royal in Corpus Christi after students across the region helped collect more than 13,000 units during the school year. The blood bank said school-based drives accounted for more than 30% of all blood donations in the area, a share that shows how much local hospitals depend on teenagers stepping up before they are old enough to vote.

That dependence is not symbolic. The Coastal Bend Blood Center says it must register more than 150 people each day to maintain a safe and adequate blood supply, and it says blood mobiles collect 90% of the blood donated in the community. In that system, school drives do not function as side projects. They are a major part of the region’s daily blood inventory.

The center’s High School Heroes program now includes 54 Coastal Bend high schools, and it is built to turn student participation into lasting civic habits. The Red Cord Program, which honors graduating seniors at partner schools, requires 3 whole blood donations, 2 double red donations or a combination of the two during the High School Challenge period. For the 2025-2026 challenge, that window ran from May 11, 2025 through May 9, 2026.

The Coastal Bend Blood Center, established in 1969 as an independent nonprofit community service organization, says the effort is about more than one school year’s totals. Officials want students to become regular donors as adults, which would strengthen a regional blood supply that already leans heavily on community participation. Earlier school-year totals of 10,583 units and 11,871 units show the program has been growing, not merely celebrated.

For Orange Grove, the recognition was a local win with regional consequences. A rural school community in Jim Wells County produced the county’s standout blood drive total, and that student effort now sits inside a larger public-health network that helps keep hospitals ready when the need is immediate and the margin for delay is small.