Thursday, October 30, 2008
By STEVE DOYLE
Times Staff Writer steve.doyle@htimes.com
Screening effort ‘rewarding work,’ says Stephen Black.
As grandson of the legendary Alabama-born U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Stephen Black was destined to do something important.
TheBirminghamresident has just been named one of 10 national recipients of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s prestigious Community Health Leaders Award. He’ll be in Huntsville today for a news conference announcing the prize.
Black, 38, is being honored for founding FocusFirst, a program that trains Alabama college students to conduct free vision screenings for poor children.
He said he chose to make the award announcement at the University of Alabama in Huntsville because UAH students have been involved with the program since its beginning in 2004.
“They were one of our first partners,” he said by phone Wednesday. “Also, the technology in the (vision screening) cameras is a NASA technology that comes from Huntsville.”
According to a news release, FocusFirst has checked the eyesight of more than 40,000 preschoolers in every corner of the state. About 5,000 failed the screenings and were referred to a group called Sight Savers of Alabama for follow-up care.
Black said it’s essential to catch vision problems early. Kids who don’t get help for bad eyesight often develop reading problems, he said.
“Vision care for poor children is a national failure,” he said. “No state does a good job with it until they get to public school.”
Black grew up in New Mexico and graduated from Yale University’s law school. He is now director of the Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
His grandfather, Hugo Black, was born in Clay County and became one of the nation’s most respected Supreme Court justices. He was part of the court’s groundbreaking 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racial segregation in public schools. Hugo Black died in 1971 when Stephen Black was still a baby.
Black said FocusFirst has trained more than 1,000 college students to conduct vision screenings at day care centers and Head Start programs acrossAlabama. The students carry high-tech optical scanners with them.
The program has relied on student vision screeners from 20 different campuses, including UAH, Athens State University and Calhoun Community College.
“We’ve found young people to be just completely committed to improving their state,” Black said. “My job is to provide them a platform to do that in as high a level as possible.”
“It sounds corny, but the reason I wanted to come back toAlabamais to make a difference. This is by far the most rewarding work of my career.”
The Community Health Leaders Award is much more than a trophy: It comes with $125,000 that Black said will be used to expand the program to reach more children.
FocusFirst is the signature project of ImpactAlabama, a nonprofit organization dedicated to service-learning projects for college students. The students typically receive class credit for their work as vision screeners.
