"The bus is here," someone yells from down the hall.'Alright, it's go time," one of the attending optometrists replies. Fifty children pour into the clinic, excited to pick out new glasses, desperate to replace their lost pair, or anxious about the dilating drops, and the day begins.
As an AmeriCorps member at Princeton Vision Clinic, fellow Chicago Health Corps member, Brooke Ashley, and myself have a unique experience by providing vision services to Chicago Public School (CPS) students. Each day, the clinic at Princeton sees upwards of 50 children. Our role at the clinic is to increase the capacity of the attending and student optometrists—we can test visual acuities, color vision, depth perception (stereoacuity), ocular pressure, and autorefract to provide an estimation of a prescription.
While providing these screening services, I have taken on a further project of developing a normative database for the population we serve, predominately school-aged African-American and Hispanic individuals. Studies have shown that Black and Hispanic individuals are at an increased risk for glaucoma, even within the pediatric population. Without a normative database detailing optic nerve and macula size and thickness, it can be difficult to determine if individuals are suspect for early-aged glaucoma or within a healthy limit. By running additional scans and photos of this population, I have slowly started to build a database for comparison.
Without the Princeton clinic, many CPS students would not receive the vision services they need. It is all too often that students are failing classes because they are unable to see the board in the classroom or are placed in special education classes when a pair of glasses may be what they really needed.
Everyday at Princeton is an experience. Some days are hectic. Some days "tengo que hablar en Español" (I have to speak in Spanish)—those days are always the most interesting. Some days are long, some days are short. Yet when you are able to help a child see, everyday is a rewarding one.
