Thanks for the replies. Dr. Beljan sounds perfect but I am on the other side of the country from him. (Frankly if there was a really good reason to use him I would travel there if needed but hopefully there is someone equally qualified in the northeast USA.) Contacting him for a referral or telephone consult sounds like a great idea.
I can't really specify what we actually know and I guess that is the problem. The director of special ed for our town said she never believed dyslexia really existed before she met dd - now she's a believer. The director of special services for the town said it appears we are not dealing with typical dyslexia but instead something between rare and unique. The OG tutor we were going to use if we went with the private school, and who really went above and beyond in finding information for us, was disturbed by these statements and didn't seem to think there was a question about dyslexia or that there was indeed "a rare type." The school pysch who did the testing just couldn't get over the 40 point difference between her verbal comprehension and perceptual reasoning - she was stunned and just kept repeating that this is seen in less than one half of one percent of the population.
We have been told that dd�s uneven performance confirms the ld diagnosis but no one in a school situation has ever heard her read fluently and comfortably. She did it for us for a while and was totally comfortable reading above grade level during a relaxed summer reading program. (The instructor there totally dismissed the diagnosis when we told her about it.) During her eval with the school psychologist her anxiety totally kicked in during the reading portion and she could not read Kindergarten level texts without many, many errors. Some of her errors were reading the right word but putting it in the wrong place in a sentence, reading the name of the main character wrong and changing words without changing their meaning. (i.e. she read "little" as "small" and "went" as "walked".) When she finished the book with 20+ errors she closed it and recounted the story absolutely perfectly - in complete detail.
They said she can cross the mid-line but has trouble integrating. Given a whole she can discriminate. Her math scores were above average (just below superior) but now her teacher is telling me that she is differentiating instruction for math as well because she is having difficulty with simple addition up to 30. (She skips or double counts items and for some reason the number "13" doesn't exist. It is very, very difficult for her to say the word so she somehow just skips it whenever she is counting.)
We had been seeing steady improvement in the fine motor skills but recently seem to have experienced a setback and her OT wants her to go back to strengthening exercises. Recently in school her math work has involved copying shapes on a dotted pattern. Given her visual perception issues and her fine motor deficits I can't even begin to tell you how difficult it is for her. She is not complaining but yesterday came home saying her stomach "really hurt" and she had "a piercing headache." I asked if it started during math working with the dotted paper and she said no, it started during writing time.
I guess all this indicates that we really should do a neuropsych eval huh?
