Opening in Sight for School Vision Clinic

After months of bureaucratic delays, the Oxnard Elementary School District is set to unveil a no-cost clinic aimed at catching and correcting vision problems before they can frustrate school performance.

Starting May 22, the eye clinic will be held once a week at Cesar Chavez School in Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood. If successful, the clinic could be replicated at schools across Ventura County.

It will be open to kindergarten and preschool students in the Oxnard district, funded with money generated by a 1998 statewide initiative that levies a cigarette tax of 50 cents per pack for child development programs.

The clinic had been scheduled to open earlier this year, but the launch was postponed by a series of bureaucratic steps needed to free the tobacco tax money.

Now, with summer vacation fast approaching, school officials say there is an urgent need to get the program up and running before this year’s crop of kindergartners moves on to the first grade.

“We’ve been waiting for the money to come down and in the process missing a lot of children,” said Linda Butcher, the district’s coordinator for health and nursing services.

“We are teaching children to read earlier and earlier,” Butcher said. “And as we push that developmental envelope, we want to make sure we’ve done all we can to make sure children are truly ready to read.”

The project received a $105,000 grant last year from the group charged with distributing money within the Oxnard school district that is generated by Proposition 10, the tobacco tax initiative.

The money will support the clinic for three years, during which time a trio of optometrists plan to provide comprehensive eye exams to hundreds of youngsters for a range of vision problems that could affect their performance in school.

Youngsters with vision problems are often unaware the troubles exist, even as they struggle to keep pace with peers, school officials say.

And those problems can generate reluctance on the part of students to do the simplest of tasks, such as tracking words across a page.

The vision clinic will test students for everything from depth perception to color discrimination.

Clinic staff will help students, parents and teachers learn how to correct or compensate for vision problems. And a referral network will be in place for youngsters who need follow-up care, such as that provided by the Lions Club, a service organization dedicated to better vision for the disadvantaged that sponsors programs to provide free and low-cost glasses.

Kindergarten and preschool students in the Oxnard district currently undergo a vision screening, but it’s nothing like what will take place at Cesar Chavez, said 82-year-old Oxnard optometrist Albert Forbes, who is helping to launch the program as part of his mission to establish free eye clinics for the poor.

“We hope the first year to check at least 500 kids,” said Forbes, who will staff the clinic with fellow optometrists Thomas L. Wolf and Adolfo Murillo. “And if we get more financing, then we will try to expand it.”

Nearly $12 million a year flows to the county in Proposition 10 tax revenues. Of the total, $1.6 million a year is funneled to the Oxnard Neighborhoods for Learning Collaborative, a collection of school, community and faith-based agencies responsible for distributing the money within the Oxnard Elementary School District boundaries.

School district Supt. Richard Duarte, who helps decide how the money is handed out, said the group has doled out about $700,000 for everything from immunization clinics to parenting programs.

Forbes said it was particularly important to him to create the vision clinic in the low-income La Colonia neighborhood.

Children of all economic levels suffer from eye problems that can hinder school performance, he said. But parents who are better off financially often have the resources to catch those problems early and get help.

“This helps even the playing field,” said Forbes, an eye doctor for more than half a century who has long studied the link between good vision and learning. “It doesn’t mean we’ll solve the entire problem, but hopefully we’ll be a spark in the dark.”