We've paid (luckily with help from insurance) for 3 full psych-ed assessments for 2 kids. It has been expensive but worth every single penny for us.
Round 1 - DS age 6.5. The school told us to test him for ADHD because of his behaviour at school. We disagreed on the ADHD, assumed he was gifted and bored but also agreed that something else was going on that was worth digging into. He was not very cooperative in testing, tested gifted and probable LD. He was too young to be sure on the LD side, come back in a couple years.
The school were kind of stunned at the gifted part, did some stuff for the LD. Neither DH or I had any clue about LD's so that part was very helpful. On the gifted side, the most important thing was that it gave ME the confidence and objectivity to advocate for more challenging work in an attempt to help with his behaviour.
Round 2 - DS age 8.75. Retested to get an official LD label and access to AT. By this point, I had read a LOT on gifted and felt that his first scores were a bit of an underestimate. He came out officially LD and more gifted. There might have been a slight panic attack on my part when I saw the scores because this time I knew a lot more about what they actually meant. Once again, a huge wake-up call that we were dealing with a bigger outlier than we had thought.
Round 3 - DD age 7. DD made it to grade 2 before school became disastrous for her and after DS's second set of scores we figured we might be underestimating her as well. The odd part is that for two kids who behave VERY differently at school they actually had surprisingly similar scores (but she isn't LD).
I personally felt much more comfortable advocating with pages of psych reports to back up my requests. Even with the pages and pages of psych reports we often had great resistance from the schools so I can't imagine how dismissive they would have been without. Both kids are now in programs that require WISC scores as entrance and are much happier so that has been worth a lot as well.
Good luck in your journey.
