I'm going to have to apologize because I'm in a RUSH to leave to pick up my dd... but my one piece of initial advice is that you need to have your dd evaluated by a private neuropsychologist who does educational evals. It sounds like you had a full suite of testing (or close to that) in your dd's testing at Children's when she was 4, but I suspect she needs the same full suite of testing again (plus possibly more). Even though your school district is cooperating and wants to help, my experience as a 2e parent is that you'll never get the same depth of advice and information and referrals to other qualified professionals from school as you will from a private eval. You can most likely get that private eval - later - paid for by the school once they've completed their testing *if* you appeal or disagree with their findings... but you will have to wait until the school district has completed their testing (maybe they already have?) and you'll have to choose a private professional that they trust.... which might not be the person you'd pick independently.
I'd suggest calling your ped, and asking for a referral for a neuropsych exam, as well as getting some more detailed info re why the ped felt so strongly about the public school. Our ped has very strong opinions about schools too - his opinion is different than yours, but that's because it's *local* to us (quality of school help/programs/etc can vary quite a bit from area to area)... and I valued his opinion because he sees *many* families as well as, in his case, he had personal experience with our school district with his own children. Our private neuropsych has also been able to give us invaluable advice on local schools (public and private) that is insight we would not have received by going through a school eval or a paid-for-by-the-school-district IEE.
In our case, we were able to get medical insurance to pay for the neuropsych eval - but even if we hadn't - it would have been worth it's weight in GOLD... that's how important it's been to me as a parent to have it in planning for and understanding my ds' challenges and needs. FWIW, it also was very helpful in terms of having leverage when negotiating for IEP services at school - and our neuropsych gave us advice rather than asking us what *we* wanted the school to do for our ds - which happened to us at school during the IEP process - they asked a lot of "what do you want" questions of us... when really... they had good ideas what to do, and really *had* worked with children who had similar challenges, but they weren't going to let us know any of that because we would then, of course, ask for those same services. BUT - our school district is a difficult district to work with. Hopefully yours is better - it sounds like it is!
Good luck,
polarbear
