Community Voices with Teresa Sermersheim: P.A. Walsh ensures students have vision, dental screenings to help them learn

Published in the June 24 – July 9, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life

By Teresa Sermersheim

Teresa Sermersheim

Cookies and milk. Bert and Ernie. Paper and pencil. Some things just work well together. We have discovered something else that works well together — Healthier Kids and P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy.

One of our school district’s goals is for students to receive an excellent education and be empowered to succeed.

The Healthier Kids Foundation of Santa Clara County’s mission is to advocate for health care services. I contacted them last summer when I became principal of P.A. Walsh. I knew our district provided far-vision screening tests but that we lacked near-vision screening. That concerned me.

For our students to achieve that goal of an excellent education, we needed to have all our students be able to see close up. I read that Healthier Kids uses a high-tech digital optic scan camera to conduct vision screenings in a matter of seconds for each child. The expert screeners arrived at P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy one morning and by noon 650 students had been checked. Wow! I couldn’t believe how quickly an entire school could be screened.

We discovered that 63 Walsh students needed glasses. The organization provided immediate follow-up care so that families could access services they needed. I sighed. It was complete, so now I could relax.

Or could I? I started chatting with Healthier Kids coordinator, Sunny Ochoa (who lives up to her bright and happy name) and she mentioned to me that dental screening was available. It made me think about dental pain. You can’t learn if your teeth are hurting.

My job is to make sure kids have all the tools to learn and succeed. So in the middle of May, six dentists arrived at school. Mayor Tate walked over from his office to join me and we watched in amazement as two classes were screened in 20 minutes. By noon the entire school had been screened and many students were identified as needing a cleaning or dental work.

Now I could finally relax. It was almost the end of the school year and my students had vision and dental screenings and were being helped with finding the services they needed. As I shook Sunny’s hand as she was leaving with the dentists, she whispered to me: “We do hearing screenings, too.”

Just like Bert and Ernie, some things just go well together and are made to last.

Teresa Sermersheim is the principal of P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy. Her school has other partnerships which include the Walt Disney Family Museum and the San Jose Tech Museum. She wrote this column for Morgan Hill Life.