Franklin M. Foote

An Evaluation of Vision Screening

ONE should not depend on a childs complaints about his eyes to find the child who needs eye care. A good vision screening program will find most of those who need referral for professional attention. But passing a screening test or even a battery of tests is no guarantee that a child does not have a defect of vision serious enough to require treatment. The only way to find every child who needs visual care is to arrange for a thorough and competent eye examination. These are the conclusions of a research study to evaluate methods of testing childrens vision which grew out of a meeting of school health experts called in Washington, D. C., in June 1947 by the federal Childrens Bureau and the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness. Ever since Connecticut passed its first law requiring the vision testing of school children in 1899, educators and public health leaders have asked the questions raised at this meeting: What is the best method of vision screening? Should the .screening be done by a nurse or a special technician, or may the classFRANKLIN M. FOOTE and MARIAN M. CRANE

Progress in Meeting the Eye Problems of Children

AT least 80 per cent of our learning comes through the sense of sight, particularly in these days when the emphasis is on visual education. It is small wonder then that school authorities are becoming more and more concerned about the eyes of the school child. This concern has been heightened by our discovery within recent years that many of the children who do not do well after the fifth grade in school are poor readers. At first, when a large number of children with reading disabilities were found, it was believed that the chief source of the difficulty was physicalsome optical or muscle defect in the eye itself which interfered with clear vision. It is true that the prevalence of refractive errors and of muscle imbalance among children with reading disabilities is much higher than among those children who are good readers. However, the work of many reading clinics proves that eye defects are by no means the whole story. Some children with excellent vision are very poor readers. Some children with significant myopia, farsightedness, or astigmatism are good readers. And with most children who are poor readers and who have defective vision, the provision of glasses which bring their vision up to 20/20 or even to 20/15 does not make them good

Classrooms for Partially Seeing Children

Partially seeing children need to be considered whenever a new school is built or an old one remodeled. This applies from the earliest primary rooms to the collegiate level. The purpose of this article is to point out factors which deserve very careful planning on the part of school officials, whether the space involved is to be a special classroom or a resource room for the visually handicapped.