Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Sibling 2E? Or just NT?

Just an update as the school year is progressing: We found out last week that DD has been flagged by the school's testing as reading below grade level and will be going to the pull-out reading support teacher for an hour a day. While reading with her at home (enforced now due to both teachers assigning reading to a parent as homework), I've been kind of shocked at how little she seems to have retained from her work in K. She must have memorized more books than I realized, because I'm not sure she can read more than a handful of words when taken out of context. It's also clear that she is reversing or confusing many letters and can't distinguish vowel sounds.

We had planned to wait until the teacher conferences in late October to talk with the school about having them do a special ed evaluation, but now I'm starting to feel more urgent about it. What will maximize our chance of success (where success is getting the school to do an LD evaluation)? Let the teachers observe her for a few more weeks and then share our concerns at the meeting and see whether they agree with us that she needs evaluation? Or should we try to get the process moving now, since the school has now identified their own concerns about her reading progress?

Depends on your state. It is likely that she is already in the RTI process, since she was identified in the first month as needing daily pull-out reading support. If you are in an RTI state, they will want to collect at least 6-8 weeks of data from her reading pull-out. Simultaneously, you can request special education evaluation. This may include a comprehensive psychoeducational eval with formal testing, or it may be that they find her lack of reading progress sufficient data to support more intensive special education services. It will take about the same amount of time to wind your way through the initial evaluation process as it will for RTI to collect intervention response data, so you might as well do them in parallel.

In most states, the process to getting a special education evaluation is fairly simple: request one in writing, stating your specific concerns (reading). The district will have between 5-10 days (depending on the state) to respond in writing with a consent to test, or a refusal to act. Given that they already have concerns about her reading progress, for the second year in a row, it is more likely than not that they will at least remain in conversations with you regarding an evaluation.

An update on this: Based on advice given here, I had DD evaluated for vision issues, and it turns out she has convergence insufficiency. It was described as mild, but many of the "symptoms" we observe when she's reading would be consistent with this diagnosis. She is also farsighted, which may or may not contribute to the convergence issue (due to muscle strain caused by hyperfocusing to compensate for the farsightedness). SO...we now have a concrete plan to first work on the vision issues, then reevaluate where she is with reading in January. If she's not catching up to grade level by then, we will likely move forward with a full evaluation. We were able to discuss all of this at our fall parent/teacher conference, and I'm pretty confident that the school will back us up when/if we do feel she needs a full evaluation. Her teachers had also noticed that she seems to have an unusually large gap between her functioning in reading vs. pretty much all other areas, especially math.

I'm so glad to have found this forum - thanks again to everyone who responded!

Aeh, I noticed I didn't respond to your last reply - I'm sorry about that! Thank you. Your response prompted me to really read up on RTI (she turns out to be at Tier 2 already in our district), as well as our state and district policies. I definitely feel better able to advocate for her now.