Bookratt, timelines and attitudes re following them can vary tremedously between schools, school districts, and states. The things that helped us the most when we were advocating for services for our ds (2E) at school were:
1) finding and familiarizing ourselves with everything that was written in our school district and state policy handbooks for SPED and gifted ed. There are some very quirky policies in our district, for instance, and it helps to know of them ahead of time instead of having them sprung on you as a surprise by the school. For instance, our ds needed OT in 2nd/3rd grade (had a strong recommendation from a neuropsych). Our school district has a policy they will not provide OT services to a child unless they have an IEP that requires SLP services (go figure - not necessarily related at all!). Our school district also has very specific performance/testing bars that children must (on paper) fall below in order to qualify for services, but in real life you can argue and convince for situations that fall outside of those guidelines. It helps to know ahead of time if your child doesn't meet the guidelines so that you can build a convincing argument with evidence and research-based arguments prior to meeting with school staff to discuss the request.
2) Consulting with a local parent advocate (this was free in our area and is free in many areas, paid for by federal grant $). We found our advocate through the yellow pages link at
www.wrightslaw.org - they have contact info listed for various types of resource organizations in all 50 states. We never actually had to meet our advocate, just asked for advice over the phone, and the advice was worth it's weight in gold - the advocate knew the ins and outs of our specific school and district, gave us specific info on what the school was required to do (vs what the school told us), and was able to give us specific wording to use when we communicated with the school. If we'd needed the assist, the advocate was willing to sit in on team meetings with us. The other thing the advocate did for us at the very beginning was to let us know that yes, our ds should qualify for services based on the info we had from private evals.
3) Put all requests in writing, and follow up all meetings/communications with a written summary of what was said/understood. You can get good help with this from the Wrightslaw book "From Emotions to Advocacy" (also at
www.wrightslaw.org). Although time frames may differ, I'm fairly certain all school districts have some type of time frame in which they have to respond to a written request - either agree or deny. If they agree, they have timeframes within which they have to complete the testing; if they disagree they have to respond with the reason they are denying the eval.
4) We found that even though we understood the timelines our school was operating under and gave appropriate written notice etc, the school staff still had difficulty meeting those deadlines simply because they were swamped with requests for evals and personnel doing the evals were shared between schools. Our school psych asked for an extension of testing, and although we didn't want to do it (we'd been waiting for almost 3 years at that point), we gave the psych the extension. Having a little bit of flexibility and understanding that nothing is going to happen quickly helped to get us through it, helped maintain a good relationship with the school staff, and did get us a better understanding and eval than if we'd held the school to the absolute deadline.
Good luck as you work your way through the process - we were basically in the same place you are now two years ago (and that was two years of trying to understand what was up with ds and how to navigate the school sytem). It's not an easy place to be, so my last piece of advice is to accept that it's not going to move quickly and that there will be a lot more questions and a lot more rethinking along the way, but you will be able to eventually look back and know that you've done everything you needed to do for your ds.
Best wishes,
polarbear
ps - fwiw, if you haven't asked, I'd ask in writing (email) for a copy of the ILP that you were told exists for your ds at the parent teacher conference.
