An update on this: Based on advice given here, I had DD evaluated for vision issues, and it turns out she has convergence insufficiency. It was described as mild, but many of the "symptoms" we observe when she's reading would be consistent with this diagnosis. She is also farsighted, which may or may not contribute to the convergence issue (due to muscle strain caused by hyperfocusing to compensate for the farsightedness). SO...we now have a concrete plan to first work on the vision issues, then reevaluate where she is with reading in January. If she's not catching up to grade level by then, we will likely move forward with a full evaluation. We were able to discuss all of this at our fall parent/teacher conference, and I'm pretty confident that the school will back us up when/if we do feel she needs a full evaluation. Her teachers had also noticed that she seems to have an unusually large gap between her functioning in reading vs. pretty much all other areas, especially math.
I'm so glad to have found this forum - thanks again to everyone who responded!
