Category: News

Ver Bien para Aprender Mejor has been working in Mexican public schools for more than 21 years, doing screening for refractive errors and delivering eyeglasses to those children who need them. Optometry Giving Sight has been supporting their work for several years and that continues into 2020.
 
A large team of professional optometrists and teachers perform the screening of the whole population at schools that Ver Bien visits. They travel from Mexico City to states throughout the country. Local state authorities coordinate that that the eye care teams visit every single school in the territory.

Ver Bien establishes agreements with local governments to pay for 50% of the cost of the eyeglasses, with the remainder paid for by Ver Bien with private donations, like that of Optometry Giving Sight. Conditions at schools differ wildly as some can accommodate screenings, exams and dispensing of glasses in classrooms, while other situations exist in very poor conditions and are conducted outside.
 
The goal for Ver Bien in 2020 is to screen 1 million children in public schools in Mexico. They expect to provide over 300,000 pairs of glasses to children who suffer from a refractive error and other issues that can easily be corrected.
 
In more than 21 years, Ver Bien para Aprender Mejor has delivered more than 5.8 million glasses to children all over Mexico. This gives those students the same opportunities as those students who do not need glasses. Hundreds of thousands of these children have no access to eye health services as they live in very poor rural communities, where families don’t have the resources to pay for eyeglasses.
 
Correcting children’s vision problems helps to keep school dropouts to a minimum. Children who have left school are more susceptible to searching for an illegal income. For this reason, was included in the World Economic Forum paper “Eyeglasses for Global Development: Bridging the Visual Divide” as a case in point.
 
The eyeglasses that Ver Bien provides are produced by a Mexican manufacturer according to each child’s need. The children are able to select the frame of their choice from 30 combinations of colors and sizes. The student’s families do not have to pay for the eyeglasses or for the optical services.

Optometry Giving Sight is very pleased to again be supporting the Vision Impact Institute’s Kids See: Successs program for 2020. This initiative was first launched and supported by Optometry Giving Sight in 2016 to fight for mandatory comprehensive eye exams for children as they enter kindergarten.

A comprehensive eye exam for young children as they enter school and is often overlooked and can be a critical piece to their success as a student. Without this, parents may be sending their children to school with an undetected vision condition that can impair development, interfere with learning, and contribute to behavioral issues. As 80 percent of learning takes place through our eyes, a comprehensive eye exam is the only way to ensure a child can see clearly and has healthy eyes that work properly.

To advocate for every child’s right to see clearly, the Vision Impact Institute created Kids See: Success, with the goal of educating parents, state and city legislatures, child advocacy groups, school nurses, teachers and administrators about the need for mandatory comprehensive eye exams prior to entering kindergarten.

According to the National Center for Children’s Vision and Eye Health, the economic costs of children’s vision disorders amount to $10 billion annually in the United States, taking into account the costs of medical care, vision aids and devices, caregivers, special education, vision screening programs, federal assistance programs and quality of life losses. In addition, children with untreated amblyopia will earn 12% less over their working lifetime than a treated child, according to the Children’s Eye Foundation.

While many states and cities require vision screenings prior to entering school, that is not enough. A comprehensive eye exam from an eye doctor is the best way to determine whether a child’s eyes are healthy and working properly. While vision screenings can detect some problems, more serious vision issues may go undetected, including binocular vision problems and amblyopia (lazy eye), which can cause vision loss in children. However, a comprehensive eye exam can help detect and treat these conditions earlier. A comprehensive eye exam can make the difference between poverty and opportunity, and we want to give all children that opportunity as early as possible.

With one in four children in the U.S. having an undetected vision condition, the Vision Impact Institute’s goal is to drastically improve this statistic and help provide all children with a level playing field. That is why Optometry Giving Sight has supported the Vision Impact Institute / Kids See: Success – to encourage cities and states across the U.S. to require a comprehensive eye exam for children entering kindergarten. Only through a comprehensive eye exam can parents and teachers ensure that a child’s eyes are healthy and working properly, and that he or she is equipped to learn.