In January 2016, OneSight opened its second school-based vision center at Fairfield City Schools, a suburb of Cincinnati consisting of 10,000 students, nearly half of which live below the Federal U.S. poverty line. This new vision center will provide primary vision services to all students and their family members; including comprehensive eye exams, the prescribing and dispensing of corrective lenses and glasses if necessary. Sears Optical – Luxottica Group’s full service vision care provider – is the presenting sponsor of the vision center. With Sears Optical’s support, OneSight will provide all equipment, operational start-up and training for the vision center.

OneSight facility is an integral part of the Fairfield School Based Health Center, the first of its kind in a suburban community in the U.S. to provide fully integrated health care. Here students, their family members and school district staff in Fairfield City Schools have access to primary medical, dental, vision and behavioral health services. The purpose of the center is to keep students in school and ready to learn. They will receive care during the school day, without requiring the parents to leave work.

The OneSight school-based vision center model was developed to provide access to students who need to see clearly to do well in school. Eighty percent of what children learn is visual. Yet one in four students in the United States has an undetected vision problem. For these children, for whom poor vision can often affect school performance and result in low self-esteem and unrealized potential.

The problem is not confined to small villages in disadvantaged countries in the world, but more and more often occurs in the suburbs of big cities, where people cannot access health and vision care due to lack of insurance, financial need, transportation and other barriers.

That’s why OneSight is committed to providing quality care to students in need year-round through self-sustaining centers within public schools. These school-based vision centers are established from a public-private partnership between health, eye care and education institutions and experts.

Pioneer of the school-based model is OneSight Vision Center at Cincinnati Oyler School; the first to open in the U.S., in 2012, to serve children in Cincinnati Public Schools. Entering now its fourth school year, the vision center has provided eye exams to over 8,600 students in Cincinnati and dispensed over 6,200 pairs of glasses.