I'm curious about why some of the previous posters are wary of school psychologists. Why should I trust their diagnosis less than I should trust those of private professionals? I just want the school to be able to accommodate her needs and help her with her challenges.
In our case, it was a private school with an affiliated psychologist, and we ended up with a horrible evaluation suggesting ADHD, ODD, and Asperger's based mainly on evaluations from teachers who couldn't stand DD. I think the idea was to make DD look as bad as possible on paper to justify kicking her out--which was totally unnecessary, b/c all they had to do was say, look, this isn't working. Maybe they were afraid we would try to sue or something, which is ridiculous b/c it would not even work and we would not do that. But anyway now we have this awful eval that if you read it and don't know DD it sounds like she should be locked in a padded room. We've been trying to get a diagnosis we can believe in from an independent specialist, and I think we're going to end up with Asperger's (maybe Asperger's-ish, since DD doesn't have all the traits), which I can believe based on everything I've read and plus it's a diagnosis that isn't going to scare school admissions people out of their wits. I'm still so grateful that we were able to get DD into another school this year even though they did see that evaluation--but five other schools didn't after seeing it. It's just very disappointing that the whole thing happened that way, and I would never let it happen again.
