Our situation has been with the school saying they don`t consider reports from privately hired psychologist (no matter how qualified) to be valid because they`re not "medical doctors" and yet the school district has an in-house psychologist who does assessments (which presumably they consider valid).
I wonder if this is because they have had experience with privately hired psychologists coming to the conclusion that they should be doing something differently. So then they have their in-house psychologist (who of course has no conflict of interest
say they're doing everything they should and (fill in the blank--it's your fault for not parenting correctly; your kid has x, y, and/or z disorder and shouldn't be at that school, etc.). But it doesn't make any sense to say they accept the opinion of one and not the other psychologist without a credible reason...such as differing qualifications, for example, in which case I would suspect the private one is more likely to 'win.' Surely there is someone somewhere in this bureaucracy who realizes this is a transparent effort to avoid providing reasonable accommodations. Or there should be. I think maybe schools shouldn't be allowed to rely on in-house psychologists, since there seems to be a pattern of misuse, or at least enough individual anecdotes to make me believe that there is.
