Optometry Cares - The AOA Foundation awards Healthy Eyes Healthy Children (HEHC) grants up to $5,000 per grant to projects across the nation that increase the quality of children's eye care through health programs and collaborations within as well as outside the optometric community. The Pennsylvania Optometric Association's (POA) new Children's Vision Care Alliance (CVCA) has been awarded $4,800 to expand its Kids Welcome Here program, which is a public outreach campaign targeting school nurses and parents to help provide children with proper eye and vision care.
Studies have shown that up to 60% of children identified as problem learners actually have a vision deficiency. Vision screenings alone fail to identify up to 30% of the students with correctable vision problems. With help from this grant, and through partnership with Pennsylvania schools, the CVCA will educate nurses on the proper techniques for vision screening, educate teachers and parents on the signs and symptoms of visual deficiencies, and conduct a public relations campaign to educate the public generally about the identification of visual deficiencies in children and the need for comprehensive pediatric eye exams.
The goal is to spend the first part of 2020 preparing educational outreach programs. School districts will be offered free training to assist in meeting current screening protocols and to provide information necessary for teachers and parents to identify signs of visual difficulties being experienced by the children in their lives. As with the Kids Welcome Here program, the CVCA will work with the Pennsylvania Health Department to assure that any school nurse under its jurisdiction receives proper education credit to meet their licensure requirements.
The program will raise the level of understanding about the ways to identify children with visual deficiencies and encourage the scheduling of annual eye exams for children across the commonwealth. By giving educators the tools to properly identify children with correctable vision problems, children improperly classified as learning disabled can be removed from disability programs.
Additionally, the grant will help fund colorful, child-friendly posters and brochures for use in health classes and school nurse offices to promote comprehensive eye examinations. Optometry offices will be offered the same posters to encourage parents to bring in their children for examinations.
For more information, readers may visit http://www.poaeyes.org.
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