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Friday’s front-page story may have caught your eye (no pun intended) thanks to the pictures of cute kids getting their vision checked at Heights-Murray Elementary School, but this was much more than a photo-op. It clearly demonstrated the critical link between early childhood healthcare and academic success.
Regarding the former, United Way of Wyoming Valley set up the event to showcase its new See to Succeed initiative, a textbook example of how a relatively small amount of money coupled with some private/public partnerships can make an enormous difference.
United Way spent about $9,000 to buy a lightweight, high-tech vision scanner that not only shortens vision screening time from minutes to seconds, but provides more accurate and helpful information. School Nurse Tracey Glynn-Roulinavage first demonstrated the traditional visual acuity test — cover one eye, read letters from a chart, cover the other eye and repeat — and noted it takes about three minutes.
With a state mandate that every student in kindergarten through sixth grade gets tested every year, that’s literally months of screenings done in between her countless other duties.
With the computerized screener, the process takes about three seconds, and gives a wealth of information, detecting potential problems with nearsightedness, farsightedness, uneven pupils, lazy eye, and astigmatism, to name a few. These are, Glynn-Roulinavage pointed out, things the traditional test simply didn’t flag. It’s not a diagnosis, she stressed, but it is highly reliable in determining students who should go get a full check up with an optometrist.
And that’s where schools become more than places of education. As United Way President Bill Jones pointed out, Wilkes-Barre Area screened about 7,300 children last year, with 662 meriting a full optometrist follow-up. Yet only 109 of those 662 children got eyeglasses.
See to Succeed wants to fix that by partnering with the Wright Center and area doctors to set up in-school exams. Jones is looking to take it even further than that by finding the money to pay for eyeglasses when a child’s family can’t afford them.
The value of this effort is obvious. Jones’ numbers suggest that hundreds of students each year do not get appropriate help with vision problems that could be easily corrected. That’s hundreds of children staring at blurry blackboards (or these days, whiteboards) without knowing what they are looking at, or straining to read books even in the earliest grades. The harder it is to read, the more likely a child is to give up, meaning they quickly slip behind academically as coursework progresses.
Public schools increasingly serve as a pivotal part of the social safety net, providing meals, assuring vaccinations, conducting medical screenings, and connecting children and families with the support agencies that can help them most.
Jones and the United Way are to be commended, yet again, for leveraging a modest investment (the scanner will be rotated through all district schools for screenings) to see big gains in childhood well-being that should benefit the region for many years to come.