Three-year-old Jonah likes Rescue Heroes and puzzles, but he isn’t quite sure about his new glasses. Jonah is one of the many children the Sight & Hearing Association (SHA) finds every year who need glasses. Jonah was screened at New Hope Pre-Kindergarten, where screeners from SHA found his vision to be 20/40 in his left eye and 20/50 in his right, with a tendency to deviate. Within one month after screening Jonah, he had visited a pediatric ophthalmologist and was wearing glasses. “Obviously, if there was a problem, I wanted to get it checked out right away,” explained Jonah’s mom. “It made sense to move to the next step to rule anything out.”

Dr. Parvataneni, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Northwest Eye Clinic, confirmed the screening results. Jonah is farsighted (meaning he doesn’t see clearly up close) with a slight movement (misalignment) between the two eyes. The glasses will work to correct the muscle imbalance. Jonah’s mom is a high-school counselor and working in the education field heightens her awareness of the importance of vision and hearing to learning. “Vision and hearing are imperative to learning. You need to remove any barrier [whether it’s a vision problem or something else] that would make learning more challenging. It was difficult initially to hear the results of the screening,” because the problem wasn’t something she or her husband could see. “We didn’t suspect any problems,” she said. “But that’s what preventative screening is all about; it is so much easier to rectify the problem before it’s a bigger, more noticeable problem.”