News And Comment
In a statement of the Commissioner of Education for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1907, and issued September 14, 1907, occurs the following paragraph of great interest to those who are studying the pedagogical retardation of school children throughout the United States: “An inquiry into the places where the help of this Office is most needed has brought to notice the fact that one of the great weaknesses of our educational system is in the matter of school attendance, and further inquiry shows that the question of school attendance is closely bound up with questions of child labor, of hygiene and sanitation, in school and out, of parental neglect in many forms, and with others of the same general group of questions. It is clear that educational improvement is conditioned upon many things affecting the general welfare of children, and that this Office should do much to diffuse information and spread a wholesome influence touching these things. To this end the appointment of a highly competent specialist in the welfare of children is desired and recommended.”
Investigations made in the Philadelphia schools last year by Dr. Wessels, a medical inspector working under the Bureau of Health, showed that many children were retarded in school progress because of eye strain or other eye troubles which could have been easily corrected by glasses. A large number of these children, however, were too poor to pay for glasses, even of the cheapest make. Some of them were provided with glasses by the School Nurse, from a fund collected for that object by the Visiting Nurse Society. A long step in the direction of relieving many other children whose eyes are defective, has recently been taken by Dr Joseph S. Neff, Director of Public Health and Charities, who obtained an appropriation of three hundred dollars from City Councils to purchase glasses. The prescriptions will be filled by a local optician, and the words “Bureau of Health” will be stamped in the frames of the glasses, for identification in case they should be lost or stolen.
On Dr Neff’s urgent recommendation Councils further created the position of school ophthalmologist, to which Dr L. C. Wessels has been appointed. Dr Neff also urged the creation of a department of school nurses and the appointment of a neurologist, to serve in connection with the medical inspectors in the examination of backward children who are mentally defective. This department of school nurses has been organized through appropriations made by Councils to the Board of Education. It was not possible, however, to secure the appointment of a neurologist for the current year. The expenditure of the amounts appropriated for the year 1908, and the administration of the various departments under Dr Neff’s direction, will not only help the school children of Philadelphia dii ctly, but will serve to educate public opinion and show the necessity for a more generous appropriation for another year.
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