Health care professionals are facing a shortage of personal protective equipment, otherwise known as PPE, but one Mid-Prairie teacher is creating new equipment with the school district’s 3D printer. Middle school teacher Terra Huber joins Iowa nonprofit New Bohemian Innovation Collaborative, NewBoCo, in creating protective face shields for area health care professionals who have a dwindling supply of PPE. NewBoCo says health care facilities are using 20 times more than the normal amount of PPE, so an alternative solution was created. Huber tells KCII News the uses of these 3D printed face shields, “The 3D printed designs are meant to not necessarily replace ones that you’d need to purchase through the FDA, but it’s more for kind of a triage situation where they don’t have anything. They’re meant so that they can go ahead and wear them and can be sanitized and be able to be reused. So that’s the point of these designs that are being 3D printed. In the meantime, until the supplies actually get to Iowa, these are supposed to fill that void.” Huber is currently the only staff member at Mid-Prairie who is printing the masks, and she believes it’s better that way to keep everyone healthy and to practice social distancing. She says it takes around three hours to print one face shield, and at any one time Mid-Prairie has their only 3D printer running. Huber was happy to announce over 1,000 face shields have been created by NewBoCo and distributed to area facilities. NewBoCo is currently asking for donations to offset the costs of materials and will return funds if they are not used.