Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lee County needed to shut down Health-A-Rama for the 2020-2021 school year. Schools were not allowing visitors and many of the students were virtual and physically not on campuses. It was a strange fall without Health-A-Rama. By January the Lee County school nurses began getting referrals to screen various students’ because teachers were noticing difficulty or the students had been referred for possible learning disabilities. Mrs. Oats said, “I had to wonder if we had been screening as usual in the fall if these students’ vision issues would have been detected then, not several months later after possible learning lost because they could not see.” She always believed that the screenings the county provided for all of the Kindergarten through ninth grade students was beneficial but feels even stronger now about the benefit of annual vision screenings. “ I have seen evidence that relying on someone else, such as a classroom teacher, to see evidence of possible vision problems and refer them to the School Nurse for further screening can mean months or years of possible lost learning.”
As soon as it is safe to do so, Mary Hawley is eager to implement the Health-A-Rama annual screening program as they have successfully done for so many years. She says, “We rely on Prevent Blindness NC to assist us with training staff and volunteers and guiding us in our vision screening efforts. PBNC has been a big help through the years and we look forward to our continued partnership with them for the visual health of our students.”