Prevent Blindness America strongly supports efforts to insure that children receive periodic professional eye care as part of a continuum of preventive eye health services aimed at avoiding unnecessary vision impairment. Any such efforts to legally mandate professional eye examinations for children through legislative or other means must uphold and express the following principles:

• Measures to enforce compliance with eye examination requirements must not withhold educational opportunities or otherwise penalize children.
• Governmental agencies such as school systems or health departments charged with monitoring and/or enforcing compliance with eye examination requirements must be provided with adequate additional fiscal and other resources to do so.
• Sufficient means must be provided to deliver the required eye care to children whose families cannot afford to purchase that care.
• Any examination that includes the appropriate procedures and that is performed by a health care provider acting within his or her legal scope of practice as defined by the State must be accepted for the purposes of complying with the requirement.
• Required eye examinations must not undermine existing preventive eye health services such as community- or school-based vision screening nor in anyway hinder the continuation or development of such programs. Mandates also must not hinder safety net programs.
• Required eye examination programs must include appropriate measures for the timely assessment of their effectiveness in terms of relative economic costs and benefits in order to determine whether or not they justify the burden placed on parents, school and public health systems, and the society at large.
  
  Approval

This statement was approved by the Prevent Blindness America board of directors in July, 2001.