Our educational counseling specialist provides both testing and educational counseling services. We used her to test DS last summer; she does the testing, a follow up meeting to discuss results and recommendations, and provides a written report. I'm meeting with her this week to talk about a plan forward for him for next year. He's grade-accelerated in math, and we're having issues with scheduling for next year, so I'm going to talk to her about other options. The testing was expensive but worth it, assuring us we had a full picture of DS's abilities and providing us some support when meeting with his K teacher at beginning of this past school year. The meeting this week will be expensive too; I hope it'll be worth the cost. She's also been available for free for brief phone calls when we've had questions, and has been really helpful in those instances.
Provided this week's meeting is as helpful as I hope, it's been valuable for us to talk to someone who knows the schools in our area, has 30+ years of experience working with families on solutions to their children's needs, and can make recommendations that would take me a lot of research and trial and error to come up with.
Regarding how to find someone, I learned of our specialist through another mom on our neighborhood parents' online group. Most private schools keep lists on their admissions sites naming testing specialists in our area (Denver). I contacted two separate testing specialists and got info from both on testing, costs, and other services, before making a decision on who to go with.
