Optometry
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On Tuesday, April 19, 27 students and their teacher arrived on campus to spend the day with Salus University Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO) student volunteers. A traffic delay caused a later than expected campus arrival, but the level of enthusiasm was still high when the fifth graders of the City Neighbors Charter School in Baltimore, MD walked into the clinical skills lab to meet their optometry student “teachers.”
This was the third visit for the school, building on an idea that originated in 2014, when a fifth-grade class of Ms. Brittany Horne, daughter of retired dean of Student Affairs, Robert Horne, began coming up with deep questions about how the eye sees and what happens when an eye can’t see something. The City neighbors Charter School adheres to the Reggio-Emilia philosophy of teaching that originated in Italy, which holds that children are capable of constructing their own learning and are driven by their interests to understand and know more.
Ms. Horne contacted her father who, though retired, was still managing the University’s Summer Enrichment Program for entering students. Dean Horne asked for student volunteers and first-year student Kalie McCartin ’17OD offered to head the project, organizing both time in the clinical skills lab and fellow student volunteers to help. She put together a quick rundown of what she thought would interest the children only to have some of their questions astound her when she realized their level of understanding and interest.
She says now of that first visit, “As I explained the basics of how the different parts of the eye work and connects the information it receives to the brain, I was just blown away by the students' thought processes and the depth of questions that they asked. I'm not ashamed to admit that a few of the questions even stumped me.” She notes that “The kids really pushed us to the next level and when the next class came the second year… I made sure to tell the other volunteers that they better be on their game.”
That initial visit proved so successful that other events occurred: the students returned to Elkins Park in 2015 as sixth graders; Ms. McCartin wrote a new “curriculum” for the next visit, complete with instructions to the Salus PCO student volunteers on specific lessons/activities; she and fellow student, Omar Munshi ’17OD, traveled to Baltimore with cows’ eyeballs which they helped the students to dissect, and The McCartin Foundation was born. Inspired by the results Ms. Horne gets from her students, Ms. McCartin says now, “… I knew I wanted to keep the day going after I graduated and reach out and do more."
Kalie McCartin was so drawn to the 2014 experience that, when she won a prize from the American Optometric Foundation InfantSEE program in 2015, she and two friends co-founded the McCartin Foundation with her prize money for the express purpose of bringing this type of experience to more grade school students. According to Kalie, interacting with students and telling them how higher education can change lives has been a fantastic journey. It’s one she wants to take to other optometry schools in her native California for starters and then have it grow nationally.
After their clinical skills lab with their volunteer instructors, the City Neighbors Charter School students had a classroom lecture and enjoyed a pizza lunch before returning home to Baltimore. There, under the direction of Ms. Horne, they will follow up on lessons learned during their Salus visit. When asked about their visit, the students were enthusiastic, particularly about their experiences in the clinical skills lab, where all seemed thoroughly engaged. Some of the Charter School students’ comments were sent to Salus the day after the students arrived back in Baltimore by Ms. Horne. They included:
"I liked how we went in the different stations and learned about the different parts of the eye, They let us be patients and the doctors... My partners and I liked the station where we got to sit in the chair and got to look at our optic nerve…in the classroom, we got to learn about the parts of the eye with Ms. Kalie." - Jada Bell
"The trip to Philadelphia and Salus was more than just a field trip, it was a learning experience, and not only did we learn a lot, but we had a lot of fun doing experiments ... We learned interactively" - Gabriel Rhodes
"It was fun being there and learning about the eye…seeing the inside of the human eye and just spending time with everyone. It was fun learning how the pupil gets smaller when you shine light on it… and seeing a broken pupil in real life and learning about the eye." - Zanaya Key
"Some of the students taught us about fun stuff about the eye, like muscles, reaction times, injuries and we even got to see inside an eyeball!" - Chloe Seergae
Combining bright, inquiring grade schoolers with bright optometry students who want to make a difference has proven beneficial on many levels here at Salus. It is to be hoped that this sharing of knowledge will continue and grow in the years ahead. This visit - the third consecutive year students have come to Elkins Park - was underwritten by the very first McCartin Foundation grant of $500. Ms. McCartin has already been in contact with two California schools and when she returns there for externships later this year, she hopes to get a similar program started with them. It is her hope that she has established a strong blueprint for the program that subsequent classes of SOSH (Students in Optometric Service to Humanity) student volunteers will sustain after her graduation in 2017.
