EmmaL, sending strength and good thoughts! Getting assessment results can be overwhelming, and it sounds like you've been hit with quite a list. Take a deep breath, and start by recognizing you now have some really important knowledge in your hands. It may be hard to see where you are going, but you can feel confident you are now able to take steps in the right direction.
It sounds like your son has had a challenging time, and there may be a lot of negativity and anxiety to undo. I would suggest a first step is for you and him, and then his teachers, to recognize that he is absolutely NOT "bad, lazy, stupid, careless, oppositional, etc" - but he probably now thinks he is. Undoing that self-image, and teacher view, is difficult but essential. Tell yourself, him and his school, over and over if necessary, that it's not that he WON'T, it's that he CAN'T. Yet. This perspective shift alone can be life changing.
You will undoubtedly have a long and growing to do list coming out of the assessment, and I know how very hard it is to figure out where to start. My suggestion is look for two things as your first priorities: quick and easy wins, and what's the biggest pain.
Easy wins: Immediate accommodations to vastly reduce the volume of written output, including anything from answering no more answers than necessary to show competence, to alternative forms of demonstrating knowledge (posters, presentations, etc), to keyboarding everything possible, with word recognition and voice recognition software. (Next steps, a bit more challenging to obtain but hugely helpful, are oral checking of knowledge (rather than writing out answers), and scribing for him, as much as possible.) Provide audio versions of anything he is supposed to read whenever possible, and use text-to-voice to help access written materials. Most of these accommodations require little teacher time or resources, just flexibility, and can be implemented immediately. (We simply bought a cheap laptop, loaded it up, and put it in our DS's classroom. Three years later, he's finally on the list for a school-provided one - just on time to move our laptop into his younger sister's class.)
Max pain: What challenge is causing the most misery in the classroom, making it hardest to function on a daily basis, and probably contributing the most to his anxiety? I don't know how the language issues are impacting him, so they may be top priority, but from your list I would guess reading is the largest pain point. In terms of investing time and money in remediation - as opposed to accommodations like above - I suspect reading may be the best place to start. You'll need to find the best way to access an Orton-Gillingham based reading program for him, (probably not for less than an hour a day, five days a week). There are likely people on the board who can recommend specific resources in your area if your school can't provide. There are also home-based programs like All About Reading (
www.allaboutlearningpress.com/all-about-reading/).
In my own experience, there is nothing like undiagnosed learning disabilities to create poor behaviour and functioning in a classroom. In my DDs case, stress comes out as anger and unpleasantness, and the greater her fear, the harder she pushes away those trying to help her. First, just getting her diagnosed (dyslexia and a handful of other things) was a huge relief for her: she's not stupid, and she's not incapable of doing what everyone around her is doing, increasingly effortlessly. She just needs to be taught *differently*. Revelation. Second, starting reading remediation, she could see clear and undeniable progress in a month or two, and realized she really *does* learn well - when taught the way she needs. Her teachers began describing in shocked voices this completely different child who skipped into class, smiled, engaged, took risks, shared her progress and approaches with her classmates, and sang happily to herself while she worked. They had no idea the sullen, grumpy girl they had been dealing with was so very NOT my child.
Anxiety et al will likely need some dedicated support and help to build better coping skills and un-learn the negativity your DS has undoubtedly built up - but you may be amazed at the change a little self-confidence can bring too. If your child has been working as hard as he can, and struggling painfully and inexplicably to do things that seem automatic and easy for his classmates, and yet STILL got called lazy and oppositional, argh. Poor thing. Of course he's poorly adjusted, anxious and depressed! Who wouldn't be?
Ten months out from our DD's initial diagnosis, I sometimes still find it pretty overwhelming. We still have a long list of challenges, remediation and outstanding questions for both our kids. We're still adding to our diagnoses and the to do list they imply. But we're slowly working through it. And we can see the changes, the more confident, capable, happy kid. And the absolutely most overwhelming feeling of all those I have these days is being bowled over with joy when she takes my hand, and says, Mommy, can I read this to you instead of you reading to me?
You'll get there, honest. You're on the way and you're in the right place.
