If your son has the diagnoses you mentioned you might be better using an outside advocate like ARC and I definately wouldn't do it after you get a NO from the IEP team. It is much easier to get them involved to help get a YES. They are very knowledgable on the law and won't have any interest with the school district. They can also give you information ahead of time about such things as outside independant evaluations that you can petition for if you disagree with the IEP. You would have to sign that you disagree though. If you get them involved after and aren't aware of these options you can close doors without realizing it.
My daughter has been placed in a happy medium for ELA that we will evaluate again at the end of the year. She is placed lower than her reading level, right around her overall comprehension for fiction because that is lower than non-fiction, and above her written expression level if she is hand writing. We wrote into her IEP that she may type anything lengthy or anything that would fall under "creative" writing so that she is able to work at the higher level.
More would be included and has been agreed upon if she attends for any other classes. (She only attends for ELA, music and spanish right now, this is also written into her IEP.) Things such as grading material on content vs grammar, spelling, puncuation and sentence structure for subjects outside ELA. You get the idea.
We used the laws but were able to do it in a very diplomatic way so that the school was very open to options. I think a lot of it is in the approach and the tone you take when talking to them, and discussing your sons needs. We were very careful to point out things that were helpful to my daughter, things that were working. We used a set of recommendations from Hoagies or from the Davidson Institute about advocating in a positive way. We only brought up specific law, with paperwork, if we were getting a "we don't do that" mindset, and approached it with the thought that maybe they weren't aware that they could. Off my box now...
