The Southwest Vermont Career Development Center, like all Vermont schools, is no longer teaching students in-person — but one lone shop teacher is still coming into the building for as long as it’s open.
Though he spends much of his day adjusting curriculum to online learning and chatting with his students on Zoom, Adam Cannistraci is also doing something totally different from the work of his colleagues: overseeing a small army of 3-D printers.
Cannistraci has spent six hours a day for the past several days overseeing the production of face shields that are set to be donated to health care workers at the Southwestern Vermont Medical Center, the Bennington Banner first reported last month.
Shortly after the Bennington technical high school first closed, someone from the community emailed Cannistraci with the idea. He quickly went online and found a number of different designs — many that called for materials Cannistraci knew he didn’t have access to.
So he tweaked the designs until he could make a shield with the materials he had available. Many of the designs called for a plastic sheet from an industrial supplier, which SVCDC didn’t have. What they did have, Cannistraci said, was plastic transparencies that were used in teachers’ overhead projectors.
“Those aren’t being used anymore, because we have Smart Boards,” he said. “But we still have them laying on the shelf. So we actually found 700 of them, and we’re refurbishing those as the face shields.”
Cannistraci also tweaked the band that keeps the shield on the user’s face. The teacher found designs that called for a huge range of hard-to-find materials, but he located one store that had 1-inch nylon in stock.
“We bought everything that was on the shelf, then ordered more on Amazon,” he said.
The school is paying for the project, including the cost of all the materials that go into production. Cannistraci said each mask costs about $1.85 to make.
“It wasn’t really a second thought,” said Nicole Sauer, community outreach coordinator at SVCDC. “Our superintendent and director didn’t think twice about helping our community. Our students do work-based learning throughout the community — even at the hospital, some of them. It’s natural to help out, especially in these unprecedented times.”
Sauer said the school is happy to provide funding for the project as long as it can.
“It’s not something you plan for, or have a fund for,” she said. “You just take it day by day and do what you can.”
Cannistraci said several dozen shields have already been completed, with about 18 more being made each day. Three students volunteered to come in and help with the project, but students are still barred from the building by the safety measures currently in place, so Cannistraci has been largely working alone — which he said he’s pretty used to.
“I worked in manufacturing for nine years before I was a teacher,” he said. “Even though you might be working in a factory with hundreds of people, it’s a pretty solitary job.”
What he was more worried about, he said, was that the hospital wouldn’t be able to accept homemade shields like his. But when he called Southern Vermont Medical Center to ask if they were interested in “makeshift” shields, they said they’d take whatever he could give.
“They want them because they can’t get them,” Cannistraci said. “On top of them being cheaper here, we can actually make them — and they can’t get them anywhere else.”
“Face shields protect health care workers from fluid splash and inadvertent direct contact,” Dr. Trey Dobson, chief medical officer at SVMC, said in a statement. “The CDC recommends the use of face shields with prolonged use of N95 respirators.”
Cannistraci said he originally looked into producing masks, but found that there was “really no viable option” for 3-D printed masks online. And as for ventilators, he said they would take too long to make, and would require certifications that he doesn’t have at his school. But face shields, he said, are much easier.
“We’re able to make face shields that work basically just as good as the certified ones,” he said.
Cannistraci said the bottleneck of the project is now the 3-D printers themselves. He only has access to six as the SVCDC, but he said a local business, Hale Mountain Research, which has several 3-D printers themselves, just reached out to him about the project. He plans to help them get additional printers up and running so more of the masks can be produced.
“It’s a slow process,” Cannistraci said. “But we’re getting up to speed.”
