So... while she may not qualify for an IEP, I'm curious - has she been through an actual IEP eligibility process?
I'm not sure what the process is. School told us she didn't qualify. Here's what he have done:
She saw a private neuropsych as a young 4 (at request of preschool) who noted poor motor skills. Coding portion of the WPPSI was at 50%ile. Qualitative descriptions on Perdue Pegboard was low average for both hands, borderline for dominant hand, and average for left hand (at the time she seemed ambidextrous--or as my husband likes to say, ambimaldextrous). Neuropsych recommended OT and social skills, said she was quirky and slow but nothing wrong, IQ was high but would go down, don’t send her to prestigious private schools where everyone is encouraged to march to the beat of the same drum.
OT diagnosed as DCD, but DD did fine on most of the initial assessment she gave, including handwriting. The initial assessment was very short and casual.
A few weeks ago (week she turned 8) she saw a private neuropsych who specializes in gifted kids as part of us getting documentation to qualify for 504. At this point, only the WISC-V has been done. Psychologist is doing more testing this week and next week. I have not seen the results, but she ran some of the test numbers by me, just so I could tell the school where we're at and what she'll be recommending. I don't remember exact numbers, just that they seemed to match the 4yo ones but with higher verbal (she reads constantly) and lower (26th percentile!!) processing speed with a very low coding score. She said that the 99th percentile scores in most areas combined with 26th percentile processing speed was a big issue for her and she needed accommodations for disorder of written expression.
Is this the IEP eligibility process or is there something else? I don’t want to push for IEP if the school will give her everything she needs without one because we have a very good relationship and I don’t want to mess that up. A lot of the admin at the school like her and they want to help. I do not see her getting services. She was in EI as an infant for PT and never qualified for OT. There is something missing in these tests they do that doesn’t catch her problem. Her handwriting does not look bad unless she doesn’t know what she wants to write.
Thanks for all of your other words of wisdom. We do have her in intensive handwriting tutorials with a teacher from a special needs school. The big dysgraphia symptoms that I see in her are crossing her thumb over her fingers when she writes, tight grip, “drawing” letter strokes backwards (even though they look the way they should on the page), and the fact that she resists writing so much. She spells terribly when she's writing, but makes 100s on spelling tests in the advanced group using the same words! On spelling tests she misses punctuation in sentence dictation but she understands punctuation. She also does not draw. She says she can’t figure out how to draw the things she wants to draw. This has always been a HUGE behavior problem at school. They really don’t get it. I would say "inconsistent" is the way to describe her relationship with legible writing. My husband said that was his biggest problem too. Teachers would ask why he could do something one day and not another, and he didn't know why. He really didn't have an answer.
Husband is dysgraphic and was never supported in school (nice ivy league family, high achieving private school that his mother begged to keep him in). He received no support and was always seen by everyone, including his family as lazy, stubborn, and a waste of potential. His parents have passed away, but I think his brothers just see his issues as aesthetically unappealing. I see a real distaste for him in his family. He still struggles with not fully being able to recover from all that. No DCD label back then. He was diagnosed with "fine motor dysfunction." We are fixated on helping her through this because of all my husband went through. He is having a very hard time seeing her go through this. I think because he is reading about DCD for the first time. I can just see him getting angry and sad for himself (and sometimes relieved). And we know that once you get out of school, You. Can. Just. Type. The fact that you can be okay if you can just get out of school without having your sense of self ripped to shreds is what is most distressing for us. We just want to get her through this.
I am very thankful for the advice. We want to do things differently than his parents did. And she’s so academically inclined (he is too), that we want to make sure she doesn’t give up on school. I struggle with wondering how to tell a young child that there is a reason she has trouble with something without giving her an excuse to not try to overcome it.
