Is it possible they don't know what dysgraphia is?
I think that there could be several things going on here that would contribute to the "blank stares". Dysgraphia (and dyslexia) are never mentioned specifically on IEPs etc in our school district - the terminology used is "Specific Learning Disability - Writing" or "SLD - Reading" etc. When children qualify for IEPs under SLD, the bar is pretty tough to get underneath in order to qualify, and it would be really tough at your ds' age to qualify here for OT for the reasons you mentioned.
Like Irena's ds, our ds' diagnosis from his neuropsych eval was not "dysgraphia" but "Disorder of Written Expression" and "Developmental Coordination Disorder" (rather than dyspraxia). These are diagnoses defined in the DSM-IV and terms recognized/acknowledged by school districts.
I suspect the reason Irena is meeting with less resistance to the EDS diagnosis is that it's a medical diagnosis rather than qualifying under a learning disorder. I don't understand *why* that is, but we were told early on that if we could get a medical diagnosis of ADHD for our ds it would make the whole IEP process soooo so much easier - he would have qualified without any question and recieved the same accommodations and services and instruction as he did under SLD. But - he doesn't have ADHD.
The other reason you might be receiving blank stares and no acknowledgement is something we ran into (head on, like 100 miles per hour into a brick wall). Our school staff knew very well what dysgraphia and DOWD is - I found out by networking that there were other students at the school with accommodations via 504 and the same diagnoses. However, our school district is extremely stressed to provide services for all the students who need them, and the specific school we were in was trying their best not to qualify students for services. It took me awhile to realize that the staff did indeed understand and was aware of exactly what I was talking about, but they were not going to agree to anything or suggest anything unless I brought it up first. That essentially meant I had to know what the policies were, had to know what was commonly already done for kids with handwriting etc challenges within the district and at the school, and I had to have a lot of proof to argue against any of their arguments they tried to put forward suggesting our ds was "just fine".
The things our ds worked on when he went through private OT for handwriting included things like putting pegs into pegboard, working with resistant clay, learning proper grip and posture etc. All of it helped at that point in time with eliminating wrist pain, and his handwriting legibility improved quite a bit. If you can't get the OT through school, you might try to get a referral for private OT from your ped if your insurance will cover part of it. I do think it was useful - yet at the same time it wasn't crucial. Within a few years, when writing load increased, my ds once again had wrist pain. And we're not talking about a lot of writing - he had completely switched to typing almost everything at that point in time, but was experiencing pain just from filling out worksheets that were short-reply type answers. The lessons in posture and grip stuck, and the OT helped quite a bit with reducing the excess pressure he was placing on his pencil which resulted in crumpled messy torn-up papers as he wrote.
What really helped us the most in advocating was having an outside private evaluation and diagnosis (from a neuropsychologist). I am not sure that if we'd started with a private (or school) OT we would have understood the need for OT to be honest - even though our ds' OT eval showed he "was an excellent candidate for handwriting remediation". The numbers on his OT tests were not low - but had that large discrepancy similar to the dip in processing speed on the WISC. The OT report phrased everything as anywhere from "average" to "superior" and didn't list a diagnosis, other than listing the codes ds had been given by the neuropsych. It listed ds as "an excellent candidate for handwriting OT" but didn't mention anything that sounded enough of an alarm bell for me as a parent (had I had no other info) to have thought "Yep, this kid has an issue and I need OT".
I can't remember if your ds has had a neuropsych or psych-ed eval (either privately, or a full eval through the school)? What was the speech issue that he qualified for an IEP with - articulation or something else?
polarbear
