Note to everyone--please don't quote me because I'm probably going to come back and edit some of this later, being that it's a public forum.
Polarbear--On the eval proposal it says "5 minute Timed Writing Sample compared to age-level peers"...so they consider her "peers" to be the kids in the grade level below, and they would give those kids the same assessment, and compare DD to them. First of all, this is a very low performing school (other than the gifted program). Half the kids in DS's second grade class can't read basic words. And DD would probably actually be older than most of the third grade kids, because of her fall birthday and the Sept. cut-off. I'm not sure what this "writing sample" would entail. I pointed out to them that it's like comparing apples and oranges because she has been exposed to higher level curriculum, and there was no response. I can see how they would want to use age norms for fine motor skills, but I think this is totally different.
They didn't want to evaluate her in the first place and the principal had to intervene. The school psych is the same psych that was at the last school and she has no idea what she is doing. There is a request in in writing, we met and I explained my concerns, and they sent me a proposal with a box to check if you agree or don't agree. I can't check the box saying that I agree if I think it's a dumb proposal and not comprehensive. They are basically refusing to evaluate all areas of concerns because her computerized (untimed) achievement scores are high. I asked them to evaluate math fluency and language, as well as check for information processing problems and how that's affecting academics, and that's all being ignored. Finally the school psych caved and agreed to give her the BRIEF (which we already had done privately) to check for processing problems. It's basically just a parent inventory asking things like "does your child have a problem organizing materials?" strongly agree, agree, etc. Considering the fact that I asked them to assess her issues related to ADHD, that should have been in the very first proposal.
DD was getting private OT for a while (for executive functioning) and was given some sort of test where she had to name animals in alphabetical order and it was timed. DD couldn't do that at all and named like 5 animals in a minute or 3 minutes (I don't remember, but she was excessively slow). The OT said she did better when it wasn't timed, so anxiety may be playing a role. She's never had the CELF but I should try doing that subtest unofficially and see if she has issues. The kid is given a couple words and needs to make a sentence and it is timed? Not sure if she would have problems with that or not. Without knowing what the norms are, I guess it would be really hard to do it unofficially. The people at the private therapy center wanted her to have an SLP eval but whenever DS has had testing, he always does great, and I know DD would do even better in comparison. So it seemed like a waste of time, but I'll look into it again and see if they can do the CELF (since apparently the school system is going to refuse).
