Mamabear - I just wanted to pipe in on the cost issue. For DD7, we first paid around $25 for a screening, then around $100 for the testing. It did not take as long as you describe (I can't remember, but it was probably an hour and a half total, plus a half-hour conference at a later date; maybe two-thirds of the evaluation was done by a vision therapist and the rest by the optometrist). Vision therapy was around $2600, which included 6 months - 24 weekly visits - of therapy plus several progress exams with the optometrist.

Curious about the differences between optometrists, I took my 5 y.o. twin boys to a different but highly recommended behavioral optometrist for this type of evaluation (which was shorter, given their age at the time - actually, they were only 4.5 y.o. at the time) and I paid $125 each for the evaluation. I later had them evaluated by the same guy who DD7 goes to. No problems have been found so far; we expect to go back in a year to have them re-checked.

For the docs we saw, my sense is that they aim to not have the cost of testing be so high that people don't do it, so maybe some of the testing cost is built into the therapy charges.

hope this helps
smile