I also haven't requested it because I don't understand what difference it will make if their standard of measurement is the state grade-level standards. He will likely not fall below any grade-level standards.
That's not the legal standard. You might look at wrightslaw.com.
For speech, she is sending home a form to sign to approve tier 2 interventions. She made it clear that this was a formality. She "only needs two data points from the teacher" to get him to tier 3 and under her care. That is her goal. She said that the teachers don't have time for tier 2 speech interventions and my impression was that she just wanted to check that off the list and keep moving.
Since the speech therapist seemed eager to help, I was wondering how to piggyback the writing into the equation here.
The full educational eval is your best bet.
I would agree.
However, I would also proceed with the speech IEP. There is no legal difference between a speech IEP and an LD IEP, it's just a question of what qualifying disability is on the document. The main functional difference is that the standard for communication disability has not had as much litigation or regulatory interference (kind of goes together), so the decision to identify a child as having a communication disability is much more up to the judgement of the clinician. Once on an IEP, it doesn't matter what your classification is, only what your needs are. And that's something the team can discuss. Only the speech teacher can kick a kid off a communication disability IEP (as the qualified evaluator), so as long as you have buy-in from the SLP, you can use this as an avenue for addressing other needs.
RTII can be used to service children through general ed, diagnostically, and as evidence-gathering for a special ed eval. Quite a number of my colleagues nation-wide use RTII as the main source of data for eligibility. For NT/LD and low-cognitive kiddos, this actually works pretty well (actually, slightly on the generous side). Not quite as well for high-cognitives.
In general, I also view the prereferral process (which was the process that filled this niche before RTI--still exists in modified form) as an opportunity to identify additional accommodations that may be effective. That's why I ask teachers what strategies they've tried, and what the outcomes were.
