School-Based Vision Therapy
To my knowledge, no public school anywhere in the country, or in any English-speaking country for that matter, offers vision therapy under the purview of the school. They offer speech therapy for speech problems and occupational or physical therapy for motor problems, but not vision therapy for vision problems. Yet, if the developmental optometrists are correct, and I believe they are, the vision problems addressed by vision therapy affect learning far more than either speech or motor problems. Still, we have no vision therapy in public schools. (Note: If you’re reading this and know of such a school, please email me from the home page.)
Note: In December of 2009 I did receive an email from Ms. Raquel M. Benabib, a certified vision therapist, informing me that a Montessori/elementary school in Mexico City had been serving the vision needs of its students for 17 years. That school is Colegio Senda and the program is supervised by optometrist Carmen Marotto. She did say that it was a private school and that the program is therefore funded by parents. Apparently they have been satisfied enough with the results that they've continued with it for almost two decades.
Speech problems are obvious, as are motor problems, and as a society, we refuse to allow these problems to persist in school children if we can fix them. While it might be reasonable to just tell parents to hire the speech therapist on their own, it’s also reasonable to assume that taxpayers don’t feel unduly burdened by the decision to systematically address these issues so that even the neediest child will receive these essential services.
Why School-Based Vision Therapy Might Happen Eventually
Suppose learning problems are mostly caused by undiagnosed vision skills problems, as asserted repeatedly on this site. Suppose the developmental optometrists are correct. Furthermore, suppose that school personnel gradually become convinced that vision therapy is exactly the intervention that learning disabled children most often respond to. That is, suppose the adoption of the Response to Intervention (RTI) Model results in convincing schools that vision therapy is a much-needed, valuable intervention because the responses are so obvious, and beneficial.
How much of a leap is it from those suppositions to the assertion that schools should employ vision therapists just as they presently employ speech/language therapists for speech issues and physical/occupational therapists for motor issues? How much of a leap when you consider the cost of consigning a child to a career track composed of resource rooms, special education classes, low-wage employment and possibly even the welfare rolls or incarceration?
School-Based Vision Therapy Would be More Efficient
Moreover, it would be much more efficient than the present system where a parent of each child must learn to oversee home-based exercises. It would be far better to have trained aides in the schools who could work with several children each day, and who would almost certainly become more effective as they gained experience. School-based vision therapy would also be a tremendous benefit to those students whose parents lack the time, or the money, or possibly even the inclination, to see that their children get the vision help that they need.
The next page, Vitamin D3 Supplementation, discusses the prospects for addressing the current epidemic of vitamin D3 deficiency with a change in public policy.