Thanks for all the input. I find it so frustrating that these so called "professionals" may have never heard of the term dysgraphia but we ordinary parents have. He originally got an IEP when he was 4, just for speech. At the time, they said it was for articulation and his voice pitch. Now I know that the issues with his speech were because of DCD/dyspraxia. His main issue now with speech is fluency and prosody. For instance he'll either talk in a monotone or like mickey mouse. And very slow. Speech therapists with the school have no clue what to do about any of that, but that's another post I guess. They evaluated him back then for fine motor but it was just one test and it was a visual motor integration type test so he did just fine. The OT back then noted that he wrote very slow/awkwardly but insisted that he could not qualify for anything because he wasn't scoring low enough.
This last spring I took him to a neuropsych after a brain injury. He did a Grooved Pegboard test which is timed and DS scored horribly (like 0.1 percentile). But was something like the 65th percentile for Beery VMI. Neuropsych diagnosed him with DCD, indicated that any motor test with a mental component will yield average results, and recommended school OT in his report, because of the fine motor issues as seen with the Pegboard.
The school has the neuropsych report but they don't seem to know about the different special ed categories or how he would qualify. At first they were acting like only kids with autism or cognitive disabilities would qualify. Now they know there are more categories than that (sounds unbelievable they could be so clueless, right?). I will look at "Other Health Impairments" again. I really hope that they are just clueless and not trying to get out of things or being deliberately obtuse just because of funding.
I have been taking him for private OT and PT for about a month. Not sure how long our med. insurance will cover it.
I'm also not clear on how many of DS's issues are due to the brain injury, because last summer he was doing fine and exited private OT and PT, but I believe some of his motor skills are actually worse now (despite having a year of coloring, gluing, cutting in kindergarten). His 1st grade teacher brought in examples of his cutting to the meeting and it looked like a 3 year old did it. He has never cut that poorly in the past (at least, not since he was 3 or 4). So it could be the TBI is causing some of the issue (for example it exacerbated the DCD), but I'm not sure how anyone would sort out what is TBI and what is DCD that was always there.
