By Josette Keelor — Daily Staff Writer

Children who do poorly in school might not have a learning disability or behavioral problems.

According to Dr. Trisia Jarvis, pediatric optometrist at Dr. Bruce Keenan's office in Winchester, school administrators and doctors have been finding that some children have trouble in school because of undiagnosed or untreated vision problems.

Jarvis says she recently diagnosed 7-year-old Parker Heishman, of Stephens City, with visual perceptual problems. "When he reads or does anything, he doesn't process it properly," she says.

"His eyes don't work together; they don't focus together," says Diana Heishman, Parker's grandmother. The vision itself crosses over, she says, to the point that Parker's eyes sometimes cannot see words correctly.

Parker's mother and grandmother do not know whether Parker knows the difference between how he sees words and how he should be seeing them.

"He didn't know his eyes weren't focusing," Heishman says.

She first noticed Parker's vision problems when she was reading with him in March. He would move the book closer to himself and then farther away while reading in an attempt to refocus his eyes, she says.

His mother, Shannon Haupt, of Stephens City, had begun to notice a problem as well.

"He started complaining that his eyes hurt," she says, and she made an appointment for him with Dr. Jarvis, who then referred Parker to Cantwell Vision Therapy in Ashburn.

Parker has what is called alternate intermittent esotropia, says Dr. Dennis Cantwell, an optometrist with Cantwell Vision Therapy, which has another office in Annandale. Parker has trouble with eye teaming and tracking, and his eyes tend to cross on occasion, Cantwell says.

According to Cantwell, 10 percent to 20 percent of the general population of children in the first or second grade have vision problems, but they might go undiagnosed because many children have perfect or near perfect vision.

"He's going to be able to pass the chart in the pediatrician's office," Cantwell says of Parker, whose vision is almost perfect.

"We had no idea, and if we hadn't brought him to the eye doctor, who knows how long it would have taken us to find out?" Heishman says.

"They just kept saying he was falling behind," Haupt says of teachers and administration at Parker's school. "She just thought that he had a disability," she says of Parker's teacher, who thought he might be dyslexic.

Dyslexia, while different than Parker's visual problems, shares some similar symptoms, says Cantwell. When Parker's eyes have to refocus while reading, he will lose his place on the page, sometimes jumping several lines down the page, sometimes scanning back over the same word.

"He can switch the letters, but he's not dyslexic," Heishman says, explaining that Parker might correctly read a word out loud once, but then mispronounce the same word farther down the page.

According to a report that Heishman received from Cantwell detailing results of one of Parker's first vision tests, the expected percentage of how often the eyes work together to look at the same place at the same time is 90 percent; Parker's eyes teamed together 10 percent of the time. His eyes were also seen to cross during the test.

Another test confirmed that Parker has double vision at times while reading.

"That was a real eye-opener for me," Heishman says of the tests on Parker's vision.

"I think it's very misunderstood," says Jeanette Teasley, of Clarke County, whose son, Andrew Baraquio, has been attending vision therapy at Cantwell Vision Therapy for a visual tracking problem. "With my son, what we found is that his brain turned one of his eyes off," Teasley says, explaining that her son is also autistic.

Cantwell is working to teach Baraquio's brain to use both eyes correctly.

"It is possible to teach the brain to not ignore it [the eye] as much," he says.

Baraquio, 14, attends the vision therapy sessions twice a week and does vision exercises on the computer.

"They adjust the program for the individual," Teasley says. "He likes it; he says it's like playing a game."

"He's definitely improving," Teasley says of her son, but she says it took a while. Baraquio, who will be a freshman at Clarke County High School this fall, did not seem to be making any progress in reading comprehension from the second grade on, until shortly after he began vision therapy this year.

"I know it's improved just from [his] reading street signs ...and just daily tasks," Teasley says.

Heishman says she hopes that the vision therapy will help Parker to gain an interest in reading.

"His older brother loves to read," she says, but Parker cannot sit still when reading. "I guess it's like anything else; if you have a problem doing it, you don't want to do it," says Heishman.

The computerized hand-eye coordination tests and reading exercises at Cantwell Vision Therapy aim to strengthen Parker's eyes and to help his eyes to refocus, "retraining his brain to get the eyes to work together," she says.

"Actually at his young age, we can rebuild [his vision]," Jarvis says.

Heishman's nephew, Elliott Galloway, of Frederick County, only recently discovered he also has a vision problem. Galloway, 25, has always experienced double vision, though he thought that that was normal.

"I just thought that it was because I was tired," he says, explaining that he could focus his eyes if he needed to. He began seeing Cantwell about two months ago and says he's seen an improvement.

Galloway says his parents were shocked when he told them about his double vision, because he had always been able to read the charts at the eye doctor's office.

Focusing problems are not what eye doctors look for right off the bat, Haupt says. "You have to know what you're looking for."

"In this area, not having anyone to notice it, a lot of people are now just realizing [vision problems]," says Heishman. Parker's vision "is 20/25, but he's not seeing correctly," she says.

Galloway says his vision is 20/20.

Jarvis hopes to make vision therapy available in the Winchester area within a few years.

"There's no one in the area who offers anything like that," Jarvis says, which is a detriment to children in the area. When children have trouble reading, people think it's just glasses that they need, she says.

A lot of pediatricians test children's far vision but not near vision, she says. "They don't have the skills or the means to do it."

* Contact Josette Keelor at jkeelor@nvdaily.com