seablue, I agree with DeeDee's wise advice above and indigo's recommendation to look at From Emotions to Advocacy. I'd also caution you not to leap to lawyers until you've tried advocating on your own - bringing a lawyer into the mix leads to divisiveness in a way that can work against your case.
I'd also take an additional step back and be certain that you have clear goals in requesting the IEP - ie, that you have a good understanding of how/why your child requires individualized instruction. What have you seen yourself as a need, and what does the new set of testing support? (I realize you may already have thought this through, but it wasn't listed in your post, so that's why I mentioned it).
I'd also be sure that you're not appearing to be going for the IEP simply to get your child into an alternative school, paid for by the district. This is highly unlikely to happen with the initial IEP - "out of district" placement is something that, from my understanding, only happens *after* a good faith effort has been made on the part of the school district to educate the child, and that effort did not work out. The people I've known who've had OOD work have had to spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and $ on the journey that leads to the placement, and even if you are offered an OOD, there is no guarantee it will be to the school you are hoping for. I would also anticipate that you'd have to show that your child is extremely exceptional, because if your school district is remotely similar to ours in any way, there will be other students id'd as gifted who also have ADHD and SPD. In fact, here, in early elementary, they are often the children identified first by the schools as gifted, because they have challenges in the classroom and are referred by the school staff for testing.
The timelines are business days in our school district too, fwiw. There is no way that a request for an eval that goes in now, in our district, would be followed up on until the next school year. This may sound horrid, but there are some realities out there beyond the deadlines and the needs of each individual student - the necessary team members that will be included are typically busy people with full schedules, and this time of year there are meetings planned and in progress putting together IEP updates for the following year for the students who already have IEPs in place.
We were able to successfully advocate for an IEP for our 2e student without calling on a lawyer or filing for due process. It did take time, however. Our timeline went like this:
1) We (and teacher) requested an IEP eligibility meeting.
2) School district required 6 weeks RTI (Response to Intervention) - this is routine, and stated in the district's policy handbook.
3) At the end of RTI, when it could be shown that RTI didn't work, the official request was made for an IEP eligibility meeting - this set off the first time clock for the district (it's 45 days here). The meeting wasn't scheduled until the last week possible, because it was so difficult to call together each of the required team members at the same time (due to their busy work schedules, and to be fair, we had our own requests re meeting times because of work conflicts for us as parents).
4) The meeting that we had at the end of the 45 days was the meeting to determine if the school felt ds was eligible for *testing* for an IEP, not a meeting to determine if he was eligible for an IEP. We did determine that testing was needed, and that set off a 60-day (possibly 45 day) period in which the district had to evaluate (test) ds. Again, the testing was put off by the district until the end of the 60-day window, and when the testing did happen, the school district psychologist felt he needed to do some additional testing. We agreed - because it was a reasonable decision and would help to better understand our ds. To be picky here - the psych could have predicted this from our original private test report... but... because he is working on school district time and budget, and because he is looking at educational need, not making a diagnosis, he had to first show that need for additional testing by going through his first steps of testing. Anyway, in order to fit the additional testing in, we had to agree to an extension of the 60-day time window. Had we pushed through and insisted on keeping the deadline, I am not sure we would have gotten an IEP (without the additional testing) and I suspect we would have been seen as not working with the district, which would not have looked good had we eventually landed in due process or legal challenges.
5) When the last set of testing was completed, and it was time to schedule the meeting, we ran into scheduling issues pulling the full team together which resulted in another request for an extension. There was really nothing we could do about this because we needed the full team present at the eligibility determination meeting.
6) We had the eligibility meeting, and we successfully persuaded the school to give ds an IEP. NOTE - the school did not offer it up at all - we had to advocate for it at this meeting. What happened was sorta like the school offered up testing results and gave numerous potential reasons for why those results might be (could be this, could be that etc), and it was up to us as parents to keep reiterating how the test results were related to ds' diagnosed disability *and* how they resulted in a need for individualized instruction. Basically, we had to prove ds needed the IEP, and the district couldn't disprove any of our reasons so they agreed to the IEP.
7) That was *only* an eligibility meeting - another meeting had to be scheduled to write up the actual IEP.
Total time between our original request (mid-August, start of school year) to having an IEP in place (last week of the school year). While that seems horribly slow, I also have friends who work in school district services (OT, SLP etc) and I know from what their work experience has been that the school district is simply overwhelmed with the number of requests for services and with the ability to accommodate the large number of children who have special needs.
I am also a full-steam ahead personality who wants to plow through quickly and get things done. It helped me tremendously to take my focus off of the IEP process and put it on my child - looking at the situation as where does he need to be and what does he need (inside and outside of school) to get there, rather than making the focus of my effort all about getting the IEP. We did get the IEP - but it wasn't the magic cure-all for anything.
Sorry if some of that sounds negative - it's not meant to be, just out there for food for thought.
Good luck as you move forward!
polarbear
