Founded in 1965, Prevent Blindness Oklahoma works to prevent blindness through public and professional education, direct community services and research.  PBO provides sight-saving programs in all 77 Oklahoma counties through a statewide network of dedicated staff and volunteers.  Programs include vision screenings, eye health and safety education programs, plus an information and referral service.

Prevent Blindness Oklahoma actually wrote much of the manual used to standardize and quantify the Children’s Vision Screening Program across the nation.  Oklahoma employees are continually called upon to train Professional Vision Screeners from other affiliates.  In addition, the Oklahoma affiliate continually raises the most money per capita of any other Prevent Blindness Affiliate.  Many of our fundraising events, such as Flight for Sight and Santa Pics, have been successfully adapted by other affiliates.

In the 1994-95 and 1995-96 school years, Prevent Blindness Oklahoma partnered with the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE).  Prevent Blindness Oklahoma received grants administered by OSDE to make vision screening training and materials available to every school district in the state.  Through a series of workshops, Prevent Blindness Oklahoma and OSDE trained teachers from 145 school districts during those two school years.  To this day, teachers who received this training continue to provide vision screenings for the children in the school and community.

The Children’s Vision Screening Program is the cornerstone of Prevent Blindness Oklahoma.  Since our founding in 1965, we have been providing vision screenings for children at preschools, day care centers, Head Start centers and elementary schools.  We provided vision screenings for 192,789 children during the 2006-2007 school year.  21,059 of these children were referred on for an examination by an eye care professional.

There is an acute need for the Children’s Vision Screening Program:

• One in four elementary school-age children has a vision problem.
• One in every twenty preschool children has a vision problem.
• Eye disorders, if they remain undiscovered, can harmfully affect a child’s personality, his learning ability and his entire adjustment in school.

Because a child does not know how well he should see, he may have blurred vision, see double or only use one eye; and he may have been seeing the same way all his life.

Photoscreening is an exciting technology that is ideal for conducting vision screenings for very young, non-verbal or multiple handicapped children who may be unable to participate in traditional interactive screening methods.  The MTI Photoscreener’s instant Polaroid photo may be interpreted by trained screeners for vision problems.  These include near and farsightedness, more complex refraction problems such as astigmatism and differences between the eyes, alignment problems and barriers such as drooping eyelid.  While only an estimated 21% of preschool-age children are screened for amblyopia and strabismus, detection of these possible problems before age 5 can help prevent permanent vision loss.

In 1997, the Kirkpatrick Family Fund granted funding for Prevent Blindness Oklahoma to launch its Photoscreening Pilot Project.  The Oklahoma County Photoscreening Pilot was such a success, that we asked the Kirkpatrick Family Fund to help us expand the program into other parts of the state.  Their 1998 grant of $8,600 allowed Prevent Blindness Oklahoma to purchase another MTI photoscreening camera plus train additional screeners in use of the camera and interpretation of the photographs.  In the second year of the program, 828 children in 20 counties were photoscreened.  In the last program year, Prevent Blindness Oklahoma screened 993 children and referred 75 of those children to an eye care professional for further evaluation.  We will have MTI photoscreening cameras available in all areas of the state and anticipate providing even more photoscreenings in pre-schools, Head Start programs and daycares in the 2001-2002 program year.