Petrina Francis, Staff Reporter

Problems with their sight is a likely cause of the poor performance of students in the Grade Four Literacy Test, says Jasper Lawrence, chief education officer in the Ministry of Education.

And in an effort to address this situation, the Ministry of Education and Youth is currently in discussions with the Foundation of International Self Help (FISH) - an organisation that provides eye care, among other services - to train primary-school teachers across the island to detect visual problems in children.

The children who fail the test will then be referred to FISH for the necessary treatment.

"We are quite aware that there is a strong degree of correlation between visual acuity and theliteracy programme," Lawrence tells The Sunday Gleaner.

Thirty-seven per cent of grade four students in primary schools islandwide were reading at an unacceptable level last year.

29 per cent failure

The Ministry of Education and Youth's decision to consult FISH followed a project conducted by the organisation, which found that 29 per cent of some 15,000 children who participated in an eye-screening programme failed.

David Wilson, executive director of FISH, discloses that 54 primary schools in the Corporate Area have been participating in the programme since October 2005. The students were taken from grades one and six.

Wilson says the programme emerged in 2004 when some volunteers from Canada conducted a pilot project in six primary schools in the Corporate Area and found that about 26 per cent of 417 children failed eye-screening tests.

Eye-care neglected

"We decided that seeing that eye care is a neglected area in health care, we decided to get a grant from CHASE (Culture, Health, Arts, Sports and Education) Fund so that they would allow us to do the primary schools in Kingston and St. Andrew," Wilson added.

Through a $22 million injection from the CHASE Fund, FISH was able to dispense more than 1,000 spectacles and some 400 children received medications for various eye disorders.

According to the FISH boss, teachers have lauded the programmes. "They found that the children participated in their classwork more, they didn't have to worry about where they seated the children, and they found an overall improvement in their reading and writing skills," he notes.

petrina.francis@gleanerjm.com