This school year, we’ve partnered with Heart to Heart International and University Health to bring our mobile eye care to Gladstone Elementary School in the Northeast Neighborhood of Kansas City, MO.
Total Children Served (as of 10/8/24): 15 of 111
Event Summary
- 9/4/2024: Our partners performed screenings, bringing a team of 21 who screened 365 children and flagged 111 for follow-up care by KCFEC.
- KC Free Eye Clinic is going back for subsequent clinics on Oct 1, 8, 23, and 30 with our team of eye doctors to serve those 111 children with comprehensive eye exams.
- We’re especially thankful to our volunteer pediatric optometrist, Dr. Jennifer Qayum from Children’s Mercy Hospital, volunteer Dr. George Hopkins, and Dr. Neel Gupta who will be helping us with these exams.
About the Students & School
- The students served here come from many backgrounds and our materials have been translated to Spanish, Somali, Burmese, and Arabic! Some require translators, including a sign language interpreter.
- Many students who are flagged for care have never worn glasses before and don’t know what they’re missing out on. Many present with behavior issues because they can’t focus on their work due to poor vision.
- And many more are in much worse condition when they come to school, arriving hungry and tired so our gentle care is one of the small gifts they get to brighten their day.
Why Our Work Matters
- Children are more likely to succeed academically, participate in activities, sports, socially engage with others, and navigate their environments safely. when they have good vision.
- 1 in 4 children have a vision disorder that requires treatment by an eye doctor, but most may never get diagnosed. This is due in part to the fact that school vision screenings can miss up to 75% of children with vision problems.
How Does an Off-Site Clinic Work?
- There are several steps involved to ensure a successful event and many people involved. We start with selecting schools that fit a target population of underserved communities and identify a partner like Heart to Heart International, KidSight, or University Health to aid us in coordinating with that school site.
- We then notify parents and caregivers that we’ll be performing eye exams and providing glasses to their child after receiving their consent.
- This step can be cumbersome when trying to gather hundreds of filled out forms. Our partners help us coordinate this important duty!
- Our partners are also great at performing vision screenings en masse – a 10 min screening with each child scheduled on a day.
- The aim is to identify those children who are in need of a comprehensive eye exam and glasses.
- They also flag those children that school teachers and nurses suspect might have a behavioral issue due to their vision problems for us.
- Our partners and the school will then assemble a list of students from each grade along with lunch timings, special school events, etc. so we can return and find the optimal time of day for a student’s visit.
- We return over a series of school days with the same partners, reserving two school classrooms for our work.
- Staff load up our portable equipment at our office and set up an hour prior to start time, we perform our work, and tear down and take the equipment back to our office in the afternoon. It can be a long but rewarding day!
- Finally, eyeglasses are ordered and arrive 4-6 weeks later, and handed out to students!
How You Can Help
- It takes a lot of work, hours of staff and volunteer time, and coordination to put together a series of 4-8 eye clinic days depending on the need.
- You can help by sponsoring a series of clinics or a single clinic ensuring that many children get the care they need to see each day. Please contact Birju Solanki, Executive Director at [email protected] for more information.
- Make a single or monthly donation here
- Donate snacks for the children and other clinic consumables like tissues, hand sanitizer, batteries etc.
