Your DS8 sounds like my DS8's twin. Mine skipped K and is now in 3rd, reading at a 6th grade level or so. He was in speech for articulation for the last 3 years, but is about to graduate. He's been diagnosed with dysgraphia and dyslexia, but the school refuses to believe it, and has refused to provide any services or even reference his dx in his IEP. I've been to 2 rounds of meetings about it. All of this describes my DS:
He has A LOT of trouble with writing, including extremely poor handwriting/letter formation and unexpectedly poor spelling and conventions. He has trouble remembering to space between words, letters are a mix of capital and lower case, and punctuation is rare. He's made little-to-no progress in writing despite OT and practice at home.
DS has been in private OT for about 18 months and his writing is minimally better, but still kinda crappy and difficult for him. Since the school has repeatedly refused to do anything about the dyslexia, we've also been using Nessy.com and doing other things at home. But, the things you listed above all sound like reasonably common issues with dysgraphia and/or dyslexia.
Have you gotten any evaluations outside of the school? I would suggest that's a good path to try. DS's latest evaluation was with a pediatric neuropsychologist specializing in 2E children. It cost a small fortune because insurance won't pay for anything related to dyslexia evals and it didn't occur to me ahead of time that at least some of the testing could've been done as "ADHD-related" instead (DS also has ADHD, so totally legit, too). I saw in another thread you were applying for DYS; if that works out, since you're in NV, maybe they'd have some names of appropriate specialists.
