Learning Issues Solved by Vision Therapy

Michelle Jones, a Frankfort mother of a second grader, calls it divine intervention. And she needed something heaven-sent to help her son, Cason New, now 8.

Always a little behind at school, Cason struggled even more when he entered second grade last fall at Elkhorn Elementary.

He was reading at a first grade level and started to object to going to school.

“It was a fight. He just didn’t want to go,” said Jones, who works for the Kentucky Education Assn. and had taught elementary school for eight years prior.

“He would even act out and get punished so he would miss the beginning of reading in school.”

Increasingly more alarmed, Jones pleaded for a reason. Cason just said, “School is hard.”

Tutoring hadn’t helped so Jones considered holding him back a grade or asking for a special education screener in hopes of an IEP plan. Neither option appealed to her.

Then, at work, while researching for an upcoming teacher training session, she stumbled upon Vision Therapy.

“I read a checklist of problems and said to myself, ‘This is my kid,’” she said.

Even more fortuitously, she realized that the office of Dr. Rick Graebe, a behavioral optometrist in Versailles with a specialty in Vision Therapy, was a 15-minute drive from her home.

In October, she brought Cason in for an evaluation. She had observed that he could sight read individual words. But put those words together in a sentence and his reading was choppy. Still, his comprehension was off the charts.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said.

The evaluation put everything in focus, so to speak.

“He had so many visual deficits, tracking problems, depth perception, peripheral vision problems,” she said. “And his visual memory was well above average. Everything made sense.”

Cason responded to treatment right away. With the use of light therapy, Cason’s peripheral vision returned to normal.

Eye tracking exercises allowed him to follow words across the page, and once he was trained to use both eyes in concert, his depth perception spiked to 90%.

Bottom line: his reading has improved a full grade level and we are only halfway through his therapy. But most of all, school was no longer a fight.

“I thought I was going to cry when I saw him pick up a book and start reading,” Jones said.

“His confidence went up and he has a can-do attitude. There was an amazing change in my kid.”