Thank you for your thoughts. It's been tough. Having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit this year!
1. We were offered a reevaluation when he was due, but since they said it had to include another IQ test I turned it down (he took 3 sessions to complete the first one.) He was doing great at school at that point, so it seemed unnecessary to put him through it all again.
I actually brought up doing a new evaluation quite a few weeks ago and was told by the vice principal that we had waived it and shouldn't have done so if we actually wanted it. I took this as a no. I was later informed by someone (again, not the school) that I can request the reevaluation even if I waived it when it was originally offered. I insisted firmly this time and they agreed.
2. They keep referencing their fba, so I brought up at the last meeting that if the function of the behavior is what they say it is AND if they are following the plan outlined in the IEP (that worked fine last year) then we would not be seeing behaviors we haven't seen since the assessment and plan were put in place in 3rd grade. I think the function of the behaviors is to escape demands. They aren't helping by sending him home when he does them.
And I know why he is hitting. He told me. He says when they take him to seclusion he feels like he is in jail and he feels so trapped he just needs to escape. They are standing between him and freedom, so he fights his way through.
He gets sent to seclusion or the office for things like saying he is too stressed to go to his next class and refusing to do so. I have requested he have access to tools to help him calm down such as a beanbag chair and weighted blanket, but they insist he needs to be in an empty room.
When I picked him up on Monday he was in a room in the office, on a chair in the very center of an otherwise empty room. Four adults were in one corner each and DS was just sitting there sobbing. I immediately hugged him and said let's go home. He couldn't stand, he was too upset. I had to wait 15 minutes for him to calm down enough to walk.
Finally, thanks for the answer to my question
I doubt they would use the extended norms anyway, so hopefully the results will be useful, but also not far enough off from the prior results that the school can use them to take away one of the classes DS looks forward to each week.
Follow up question, what tests could we specifically request to show DS has deficits that make inference questions difficult? That show that while he will have no trouble remembering the main character was wearing a purple shirt in the scene, he will have no idea why she got angry and yelled at her friend? That he can't identify relevant information and can't interpret the motivations of the author?
Along those lines, I requested that any questions that involve high level inference be given to DS in multiple choice format (he can use his logic and intellect to figure out which answer makes sense, but not figure it out on his own) and that he be given only explicitly stated stuff for his open ended questions. My request was denied.
I requested the teacher give him filled in sheets instead of making him copy info from quickly presented slides. I was entirely ignored.
DS has scribing available pretty much any time he requests it according to his IEP, but no matter how much I fuss about it and he requests it, it hasn't been happening. I had them add that it needs to be available for typed assignments because they kept saying he could type instead of hand write, which is not going to work for DS. They then said he would have to use text to speech.
DS cannot type well yet, he has an articulation disorder (diagnosed by the school), and he has verbal tics, making speech to text a nightmare for him. He also has something of a stutter. But none of that matters because the reason he has scribing is to reduce the load on his executive skills. He needs to use all of his focus just to concentrate on and answer the question. When he has to split his focus and do something other than pop out a verbal response he gets confused mid sentence and forgets what he is saying, he even forgets the question, because he is so focused on spelling, grammer, etc.
So, yeah, I'm looking for the tests that will be most useful in explaining to the school how a kid can get 98/99%ile on the multiple choice reading and writing maps tests, but still have an issue with answering an open ended questions like why did the character say she didn't like puppies even though she really did? And anything that could show he can't handle writing and thinking at the same time. And anything that shows he's too slow/inefficient to copy from the board. Because just having a list of disabilities that anyone could guess would cause these problems is not enough.
