Optometrists Anita and David Brew have been retired for more than a decade. Yet every year they renew their license to practice so they can join the nonprofit OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation in providing eyeglasses to thousands of schoolchildren who desperately need them.
This week, the Brews are in Bakersfield as part of a team of dozens of volunteers and professionals at the Kern County Fairgrounds who are providing vision care to nearly 1,000 students from 21 school districts across Kern County.
For Anita Brew, helping a young student see what he couldn't previously see is incredibly rewarding.
"Suddenly they see, and the amazement is right there on their faces," Brew said Tuesday morning inside Harvest Hall at the fairgrounds, where she and her husband and many other eye-care professionals were providing eye exams for hundreds of students.
"Yesterday, we had a kid who was terribly nearsighted," she remembered. "After he was fitted with glasses, he said, 'I can see the kids' faces across the room.'
"When he left yesterday, I don't think his feet were touching the ground."
This collaboration between Kern County school districts and OneSight, a leading global vision care foundation, has the potential to transform the academic and personal lives of countless students, said Debbie Wood, a registered nurse who served 34 years as a school nurse, most of it in the Bakersfield City School District.
"A lot of times people see behavior problems, but they don't realize it's because a student can't see," Wood said. "You put a pair of glasses on them and the behavior changes, like, overnight."
According to Brew, kids often don't know that their vision is poor, because they don't know how well others see.
Uncorrected vision problems can significantly affect a child's learning and development, she said.
OneSight doesn't just provide these services in California or the United States. It has provided access to vision care to millions globally, said OneSight Program Manager Zach Zeilan.
As students entered the big building Tuesday, they checked in at the door. All of the students had been preregistered, so their names were already in OneSight's system.
Indeed, the clinic is not open to walk-ins or the general public.
Once students are checked in, they go through a range of exams, not unlike an assembly line, except with personable people assisting them.
There's your basic visual acuity chart. Then their color vision and depth of vision are checked. Finally, an autorefractor provides an objective measurement of each patient's refractive error, achieved by measuring how light is changed as it enters the eye.
Not only do they check each student's eyesight, they manufacture a pair of prescription glasses for nearly every student who needs one.
In a couple of dozen cases, where the diagnosis is more complicated, pairs of eyewear are made off-site and returned to the children.
"In our county, not just Bakersfield but the county overall, there is a huge shortage of optometrists and ophthalmologists," Wood said.
"They're expensive. If you don't have insurance, if you're working, middle-class or lower, a pair of glasses is anywhere from $200 to $600," she said.
"We have parents who will get together the money, take their kids to an exam, and they come in and they're like, 'I don't have the money to buy the glasses.'"
Wood has seen it many times during her long career in education.
But this week, thanks to a special partnership between OneSight and 21 school districts in Kern County, hundreds of young students will see better in school next week.