Reboot of Head Start Program: Bringing Care Closer to Local Families
When she was a student at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO), Dr. Tamara Hill would join Dr. Satya Verma, professor emeritus, when he conducted vision screenings and exams on children in the Head Start programs within the School District of Philadelphia.
At one time, PCO students had little exposure to examine preschool-aged children. In the early 1980s, Dr. Verma partnered with Head Start and the local school district to change that and expanding care to younger children, strengthening services for the community, and giving optometric interns at The Eye Institute (TEI), hands-on experience in caring for preschoolers.
That experience made a deep impression on Dr. Hill and since her graduation from PCO, she’s been involved in mobile eye care for her entire career and has also worked with the Head Start program in her private practice.
Dr. Hill has now come full circle in her career, returning as one of the eye doctors at TEI helping to bring back the partnership with Head Start in the School District of Philadelphia, a program that was on a recent pause. Dr. Luis Trujillo provided eye care to preschoolers in their schools through the program two years ago.
“Many eye care providers really don’t see children aged six years and younger. So, what an opportunity this is to take some pressure off the parents as well as bring the services into the school and be able to also help the school nurses,” said Dr. Hill. “The nurses in the Head Start programs are amazing.”
For follow up care, TEI has a dedicated Pediatric and Binocular Vision Service that provides complete eye care for children, toddlers and infants.
According to Dr. Hill, the Head Start nurses do all the advanced legwork and prescreenings to identify which students need to be seen.
This year, the program started in April and has been going out once a week to various Head Start programs connected with the school district. To date, more than 65 students have been examined by the equipment taken to the schools.
The national Head Start program, an office of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), promotes school readiness of children from birth to age five from low-income families through agencies in their local communities. Head Start services include early learning, health and family well-being.
By 1983, there were about 20 Head Start sites in the School District of Philadelphia, and that’s when Dr. Gale Orlansky, retired pediatric optometrist at TEI, began working with Head Start, a role she would serve in for more than 30 years.
“PCO (and TEI) were one of the few places that was doing Head Start screenings early on,” said Dr. Verma. These early efforts helped bring eye care directly to young children who might not otherwise have access to it. In 1994, that commitment to early childhood eye care grew even further through involvement in the Vision in Preschoolers Study, supported by the National Eye Institute.
Dr. Orlansky was conducting vision screenings while Dr. Elise Ciner, co-director of the Special Populations Assessment and Rehabilitation Center at TEI, was completing exams for preschool-aged children. The study focused on identifying the best methods for screening preschool children for vision disorders, and its findings continue to guide current practices today. That research and ongoing work have helped ensure children can be evaluated at very young ages and sometimes as early as infancy so concerns can be identified before they affect learning and development. Pediatric eye doctors at TEI see children as young as three months old.
“We have the great opportunity to catch eye diseases that would not be detected until the children are six years old (in most cases),” said Dr. Hill. “What a great opportunity for young children to have already been seen by us and for paving the way for pediatric eye care at its best — being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to optometric care.”