His profile isn't that of the classical dyslexic, as his functional word-level reading is age-appropriate, which is likely why you are getting push back from the district. Also, in some states, a reading disability has to have below grade level reading achievement, regardless of cognitive ability. (From your post, it appears dysgraphia is not contested?)

He does, however, have a couple of subtle weaknesses in phonological processing, which appear to form a coherent picture, and could have implications for dyslexia. Namely, his phoneme isolation and nonword repetition scores are below average. These are probably related to the achievement relative weakness on early reading skills (despite his solidly average word-level reading skills), which fall at the border of average and below average, and tend to support the idea that there is a subtle deficit in word-level decoding skills (aka, dyslexia). It likely shows up more on this subtest than on pseudoword decoding because it actually asks students for skills at the individual phoneme (speech sound) level.

The phonological processing tasks that I named suggest to me that he may have vulnerabilities in segmenting words, which may also be contributing to his relative weaknesses in spelling (still in the average range, but far below his written expression skills absent mechanics). In other words, he had trouble breaking down the individual sounds of words. A low-level example of this would be to take the word "cat" and segment it into c-a-t. On the PI subtest referenced above, he would then need to say, for example, that the final sound was /t/. Nonword repetition is a phonological memory task, but it's also affected by the ability to distinguish/break down speech sounds, since one cannot use existing oral vocabulary to aid in the memory task.

One of the challenges is convincing decision-makers that age/grade-appropriate achievement in reading is not ability-appropriate for very high cognitive learners.


...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...