School Issues

• Infographic: Is Your Child Smart in Everything But School?
• A Typical Scenario
• An Unmotivated First Grader
• Is Your Child Struggling in School?
• The Key to a Better Education is Better Vision
• Nonverbal Learning Disabilities (NLD)
• Poor Standardized Test Scores: The Vision Connection
• Symptoms of Vision Problems that Cause School Troubles
• Vision and the Gifted Child
• Vision is Key to Developing Your Child's Abilities
• Vision Problems Can Make School a Struggle
• When a Child Struggles, the Whole Family Struggle
• Why is School so Challenging for Your Child?

Getting Help

• Raising Awareness about Vision Disorders in Children
• Requests for Section 504 Accomodations
• The Students Bill of Rights
• National PTA Resolution on Vision Testing

Reading Difficulties

• Retraining the Eyes Can Help Kids Read
• Success Stories
• The Eye Bone's Connected to the... Brain Bone
• Therapy for Poor Vision Can Be Real Eye-Opener
• Vision and Reading
• Vision and Developmental Dyslexia
• When Your Child Struggles
• Resources: Research update on Visually-Based Reading Disability

Vision and Perception

• Perceptually Impaired: Now What?
• Training the Eyes to Focus on Work
• Irlen Filters - Reading by the Colors
• Vision Changes as we Age
• ADHD: Vision And Its Valliant Attempt To Derive Meaning From The World.
• Documents: Historical Perspectives on Auditory and Visual Processing

Perceptually Impaired: Now What?

Schools are very adept at assembling teams of professionals who conduct tests with the goal of placing labels on your child. One of the common labels is "Perceptually Impaired", or P.I., and the other is "Neurologically Impaired", or N.I. What is the purpose of these labels?

On the surface, labels enable the school to provide special support services. This might consist of resource room help through an I.E.P. for special education programs. It might allow the school to pressure a parent to place a child in Ritalin. Most interestingly, it rarely provides support to help the child develop better skills. In other words, perceptual impairment is treated as a physical disability much like the absence of a hand or deafness in one ear. The goal is to help the child learn to compensate.

Optometrists providing vision therapy services go one step further. Rather than making the best of the situation, they make the best of the child. Parents interested in helping their children develop better perceptual or processing abilities, rather than learning how to operate better through crutches, should contact the College of Optometrists in Vision Development or the Optometric Extension Program for the name of a professional experienced in this field.