Report: California students not getting enough vision care

Although schools are required to screen children’s vision as early as kindergarten, more California children are not getting the ongoing vision care they need compared to previous years — is causing concern among health experts.

As CalMatters’ Kristen Huang reports, national data shows that at least one in four children needs glasses. But only a minority of children who are flagged for vision problems receive follow-up care, such as seeing an optometrist and being fitted for glasses. Only 16% of Medi-Cal school-aged children saw an eye doctor between 2022 California Optometric Association. This is down from 19% in 2015 and 2016.

Almost all of California’s 58 counties showed a lower share of children receiving vision services, with rural areas seeing the steepest declines. Colusa County, a rural agricultural region north of Sacramento, had the steepest decline, from 20 percent between 2015-16 to just under 2 percent between 2022-24.

• David Maxwell-Jollyreport author and former director of the Department of Health, which runs Medi-Cal: “The decline in performance here is so widespread that something really needs to happen. These numbers are much lower than what you would expect to see if we were doing a good job of finding kids with treatable conditions.”

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Getting promotional ads via phone text is already annoying enough, but getting them at night after 9pm can be even more annoying. Not surprisingly, a bill that would ban just that is finding strong bipartisan support among lawmakers.

Last week, the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection accepted offer which would ban businesses, political organizations and other industry groups from sending promotional text messages between 9pm and 9am, even if the user has opted in to receiving promotional texts. All lawmakers on the 15-member committee, including four Republicans, approved the measure.

The proposal is based on Texas law, and violators can be fined up to $500 for each violation. The California Chamber of Commerce opposes the bill, arguing that most phones already allow users to silence text messages at night, such as the do not disturb feature.

The bill now sits for consideration by Parliament’s Judiciary Committee.

In a ruling released Thursday, a federal judge ruled that federal immigration officials continue to conduct illegal stops and arrests in California even after she ordered them to stopCalMatters’ Wendy Frye and Sergio Olmos report.

The ruling by Judge Jennifer Thurston, a Biden appointee, granted a request filed by the United Farm Workers to enforce a preliminary injunction Thurston issued last year barring Border Patrol agents from making warrantless arrests without good cause.

The case is related to an immigration check last July when agents detained a group of white-collar workers outside a Home Depot in Sacramento. Thurston said the Sacramento operation violated her warrant from last year, which stemmed from earlier immigration actions in Kern County.

Attorneys for the federal government argued that the Sacramento sweep was based on surveillance and intelligence, but Thurston said agents detained people “without any legal basis for doing so.”

Although the recent ruling gives agents the ability to comply with her order, legal experts say the penalties could escalate if the Border Patrol and the Trump administration continue to fail to comply.

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A group of news outlets, including CalMatters, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, sued Wednesday to unseal the warrants used by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to seize more than 600,000 ballots. Bianco obtained the warrants from Judge Jay Keel, whom Bianco supported when Keel ran for judge in 2022. Keel sealed the warrants at the request of the sheriff’s office. Read more by Ryan Sabalow and Jeanne Kuang of CalMatters.