I have been a high school teacher for 17 years. I started out as a science teacher and slowly transitioned to teaching a subject and skill I learned as a US Navy Hospital Corpsman over 20 years ago. I started a program teaching my students at East High School in Rochester, NY, an optician’s skills. Rochester has one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation. I knew that a program teaching students skills that made them employable. It would be a great way to help my students aim for a consistently growing profession. In the time I have been teaching I have also seen many children who had issues in class, both academically and behaviorally and I knew that a lack of glasses could cause some of these issues. In developing my program I knew that it wasn’t enough to simply teach students the skills, but that they had to use them and we could use their skills to make glasses for children in the Rochester City School District. My program is 3 years - the first teaches students the skills of a fabricating optician, starting with an understanding of the eye, simple refractive errors, lensometry and culminating with the fabrication of a pair of eyewear for a peer, a teacher, or a family member. Second year students expand on their skills in a mass production setting and work with volunteer eye doctors who complete refractive screenings to obtain prescriptions. My students help to prescreen patients, take necessary measurements, and help to pick out frames. The third years are the team leaders for the second year students. They work on leadership skills, make semi-rimless glasses, and develop the business and merchandising ideas of an optical franchise or store of their own. See more at http://youtu.be/f4cm1plxOGw and http://youtu.be/6r_YuhfbRGg
Over the past 4 years we have been able to provide glasses to over 2000 students in the RCSD, many of whom have been referred to me by teachers who notice that their students are having issues in class and they want to help them. I know that these teachers were paying more attention because of their awareness of our program, so I decided that the best way to help was to create a Public Service Announcement for teachers, see https://youtu.be/1Y_1hm07gIg. It allows them to see what behaviors they might have in their class that could be vision related. The video has a handout that provides more detail and can be found on our webpage https://www.rcsdk12.org/Page/49068. While this video and the handout is not a comprehensive list, it can help an educator with classroom ideas and provide suggestions to parents about the needs of their children.
For more information, contact Logan Newman at [email protected]
