Description of a new year round school-based vision clinic serving the Chicago Public School students

The Illinois Eye Institute and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) entered into a partnership to address the lack of access to eyecare for children within the CPS. The district has 400,000 students and it is suspected that 100,000 children fail vision screenings, need to comply with the mandatory eye exam requirement for entering school, have broken or lost glasses, or are being evaluated due to poor performance. The IEI at Princeton School opened in Jan 2011 as a year round vision clinic and is staffed by faculty, students, staff and opticians from Illinois College of Optometry. The building is a decommissioned elementary school which is 2 floors with wheelchair access. The financial support for the program is comes from state insurance along with grantsupport. More than 5,400 children have received eyecare. Children are brought to the clinic by buses. The schools targeted identified as 90% or higher school population below the federal poverty level. The eye clinic is also open to children brought by their parents. A review of the data for care delivered shows that 75% of children seen need new eyeglasses. The clinic has also diagnosed amblyopia, convergence insufficiency and strabismus in numbers that exceed the general population. In addition there has been a higher than expected prevalence of vision threatening problems. This presentation will describe lessons learned in our first year including the strengths of the program along with the challenges that have been encountered.