will the vision therapist who says she is qualified to diagnose dyslexia and dysgraphia be able to diagnose stealth dyslexia or is that left to the psychologists which are not covered in my plan?
Syd, my older dd went through VT to help resolve severe double vision and tracking issues. We've also had our ds (dysgraphic, dcd, possibly stealth dyslexia) go through a VT evaluation. Both evals (and dd's therapy) were through a behavioral optometrist who is highly respected in our community and state, but his office does not give diagnoses for dyslexia etc; they diagnosis tracking etc issues related to how the eyes work together. While the VT you have talked to may be able to recognize dyslexia or dysgraphia, I would be very wary of relying on that eval solely as a diagnosis. All three of my children have had challenges with spelling and reading very similar to what you've listed above when they were around the same age as your dd. My ds' spelling challenges are related to dysgraphia, my older dd's challenges with early reading and spelling were related to weak eye muscles, and we are just now sorting through my younger dd's challenges but her initial testing has revealed they are not related to dyslexia. The symptoms you've seen in your dd can be caused by a number of different challenges (and they also might be simply age-appropriate phases too) - to fully understand what's going on, you really need to have a professional look at overall ability vs achievement functioning as well as additional reading-specific evaluation. We had our older kids tested through a private neuropsychologist, but you can potentially get much of the same testing through your school district. The downside to school district testing is that you get test scores and not necessarily much info or interpretation. When our youngest dd was clearly struggling with reading and spelling, we chose not to go with the neuropscyh route initially and instead found a former SPED teacher who is licensed to give ability/achievement testing (WJ) as well as other assessments, and focuses on providing assessments for the homeschool community. Her fees were considerably less than a neuropsychologist and provided us with some very good info and answers for our youngest dd, including the piece of knowledge that her reading and spelling challenges are not related to dyslexia. It also, however, left me with more questions than answers and I expect that eventually our youngest dd will also need to be seen by a neuropsych to fully understand what's up.
Best wishes,
polarbear
eta - I noticed you mentioned you suspect your dd is gifted, so I'm guessing she hasn't had ability/IQ testing yet. FWIW, we were very certain our youngest dd was at least a high ability kid but didn't have any motivation to test for gifted programs yet so she also hadn't been through ability testing yet. Since we suspected a reading challenge and wanted to either rule in or rule out dyslexia, we thought going the route of paying for just a reading eval that included ability/achievement testing without the extended neuropsych testing and diagnosis would be a great first step - and it was *but* it left us with more questions than answers. We found out dd isn't dyslexic, but instead the ability testing revealed our dd has one significant low in her IQ subtest profile (plus a ton of scatter), so it would have been very helpful to also have the extended testing that neuropsychs typically offer... and I'm guessing we'll end up at the neuropscyh with her at some point anyway.
