Don't get me started on preschool child find. It is certainly not well done here.
I took in DS right after he turned 3, and he did fine on all the cognitive/language tests, but not so much for the motor tests. But his overall score was average so they didn't do any follow-up testing or anything. The assessor told me to take him to a neurologist. Ok, so she could obviously see something wasn't quite right but they weren't going to do anything anyway to determine if there were any services he qualified for. All they cared about was one number. Waste of time. He is 2e and he slipped thru the cracks because of it.
I know you've had a particularly aggravating experience with the PSs, blackcat.
Every time I hear about another bad experience someone here has had with child find, it just frustrates me, because that's -not- the way it's supposed to be. And it's also often not the way the professionals involved want to do it, either. Of course, there are unskilled or otherwise-motivated educators out there, but quite often, they are doing the best they can within the limits of their positions. Sometimes, they would actually like you to make some noise, so other decision-makers in the system will be forced to respond. It sounds like the evaluator who recommended a neuro eval may have been trying to do something like that, since if you came back with a medical Dx, the district would be forced to write an IFSP or IEP.
And screening is not supposed to consist of one number. A deficit in any one of the big five areas of early childhood educational function is sufficient. That's why most of the preschool and kinder screeners have the same five domains. If there was only one number, then he was given the short screening version, but not the slightly longer eval version, which does not constitute a comprehensive eval.
Anyway, didn't mean to hijack the thread, just to say that the reason for age cut-offs is actually to insure that delayed kids are caught earlier, and have an equal opportunity to be schooled. That it has become a rationale for withholding access to schooling is unfortunate. Probably reflects the lack of flexible developmental programming in our current kindergarten climate.
