Originally Posted by moomin
We acknowledge that there is an incentive for her to find a diagnosis that draws some sort of funding for additional classroom help (generally that would be AD or ASD in our district), and that makes us uneasy...

Any pressure from below (i.e. the teacher wants help) is often countered by pressure from above (the district's incentive to save money by not identifying children).

It is a misconception that the federal government provides adequate funding for services for children with disabilities; the IDEA mandate has never been fully funded, leaving districts to pay their own bills. This can be a powerful disincentive for the school psychologist to identify problems; in our (wealthy) district it is still routine to see children under-identified in schools. Note: school psychologists cannot provide medical diagnosis of disability, only an educational evaluation.

Originally Posted by moomin
but we increasingly feel that some of the problems that our daughter is having and actively being created by the teacher in order to force an evaluation (i.e. not structuring our daughter's behavior until she is fully invested in an inappropriate activity, then coming down like a ton of bricks).

It is sometimes the case that parents are inadvertently offering more support than they realize, and when similar support is not offered at school, the child does worse at school than at home. This sometimes means that there is a real problem to be addressed—the disparity can come from the fact that the parents are helping the child function in ways that the teacher does not expect do do because most children of that age don't require that kind of support.

That is, how you worded your comment ("structuring her behavior") is a flag for me that you are working very hard to keep your child on track, perhaps harder than the parents of her peers are working. To me, this says evaluate.

I would recommend an outside evaluation (complete) with the neuropsych, in parallel with the school's evaluation. The school will be looking for educational implications only, in a fairly restricted way, and they may lack the expertise to catch some things that need addressing. You want to know precisely what's going on, both strengths and weaknesses.

DeeDee

Last edited by DeeDee; 10/25/12 08:14 AM. Reason: word choice