NPR Marketplace / October 12, 2012
Walk into Oyler School in Cincinnati and take a right, past the office and through a set of double doors, and you’ll find what basically looks like a LensCrafters. There’s a waiting room with a front desk and big pictures on the walls of smiling kids wearing glasses. In a small room in the back Timothy Drifmeyer — 13 years old, with a mop of blond hair — settles into a big doctor’s chair for his first-ever eye exam.
Optometrist Beth Munzel starts with some questions. “First I want to talk to you a little bit about how you think your eyes are working,” she says. “Do you feel like you see pretty well?” Timothy sees fine. He passed the initial testing with no problems. But Munzel digs deeper. When he reads, she asks, does he have to close one eye, or follow along with his finger? He uses his finger, Tim says.
That’s not a good sign. At this age, Tim’s eyes should be able to track across the page and jump from focusing at a distance — say, on the chalkboard — to the book on his desk. In 7th and 8th grade, the text gets a little smaller and kids read longer passages. Tim has noticed in his English class. His teacher gave the class a novel to read. “She told us to read two to three chapters a night,” he says. “I can barely read it.”
Some testing explains why. It turns out Timothy’s eyes are working too hard to focus when he reads. “Is it hard to remember sometimes what you’re reading?” Munzel asks. He nods. Munzel explains that using so much energy just getting the words into his brain makes it harder to retain those words. And that’s going to make it a lot harder to learn.
This is why an eye clinic belongs at a school, says Oyler’s principal Craig Hockenberry. Oyler is what’s known as a community learning center. It’s a hub for its neighborhood — Cincinnati’s Lower Price Hill — providing services like health and dental care and nutrition to help disadvantaged kids succeed in school. The eye clinic, which officially opened Oct. 12, is the latest in its arsenal. When kids can’t see the board or read well, “it damages them all the way through,” Hockenberry says. “It has a huge impact on student achievement.”