Lions program gets new device

The Plains Lions Club will soon be starting this year's free eye screening program. Now they'll be able to get the job done in half the time, thanks to a new and improved device.

The club got the newest portable eye screener – PlusoptiX S-12 – at Plains School, where they also received a training session on the device from Dave Falcon, who heads the Montana Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation. Four members of the Plains club - Duane Highcrane, Marv Tanner, Chuck Wassinger and Ken Matthiesen - were on hand for the hour-long training at the school library.

"It seems to be a lot easier to use and a lot more efficient," said Wassinger, who had done several screenings with the older model, the S-09. The Plains Lions Club started with the program when it began in Montana six years ago. They first borrowed a screening machine from a Missoula Lions club before purchasing their own.

Last year, the club screened between 850 and 900 students from all of the county's schools, as well as kids from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, said Highcrane, the club president. It usually took three or four club members two or three hours to do an entire school and all day to do larger schools, such as Thompson Falls and Plains, he said.

The new equipment cost about $6,500, but the club got $1,000 for their old machine and they received large donations from the Avista Corporation, Blackfoot Telephone and Rocky Mountain Bank.

Falcon said the S-12 is more efficient, faster, lighter, and is portable. With the former model, the Lions members had to manually type each of the student's names into the computer, which was attached to the screening gun. The S-12 is an all-in-one machine and the names can be transferred from the school's roster into the device using a flash drive. In addition, Falcon said the S-12 will read children s young as six months old. Highcrane said he'd let school principals know that preschoolers could be invited on the days the club does its screening.

The old machine weighed about four pounds, nearly twice the weight of the new one, and was cumbersome to use, said Wassinger.

"It was harder to hold and if you weren't dead on, it wouldn't read. On this one, if you're close, it will automatically read it," he added.

The device shoots an infrared beam to the student's retina. The beam is bounced back to the machine, which instantly reads the information. The process takes about 20 seconds, and catches such problems as lazy eye, near and far sightedness and stigmatism, said Falcon.

Falcon, a member of Kalispell Sunrisers Lions Club, has screened some 60,000 kids over the years and has caught around 800 kids with eye defects. Three years ago, his screening picked up a tumor behind a child's eye. The student was rushed to the hospital and doctors were able to save the eye.

"This is an important program, but we're not doing this to take business away from an optometrist. We're catching problems early, which makes his job easier," said Falcon, who has provided training on the S-12 to six clubs. "I think this program is very good for catching problems early and I'm trying to get more machines out there," said Falcon. Of the 68 Lions clubs in Montana, almost 30 have screening devices.

Highcrane said they're happy with the new screener and said it looks relatively easy to use. He said they had put the word out that people could have stopped by the library Saturday, when the club was training on the new device, but no one showed and the club members practiced screening on each other. However, he added that they'll have additional training at their October meeting. Noxon and Trout Creek will be the club's first screening this school year with the S-12, which the president said will be sometime in October.