There was also a mention previously of school districts purposely trying to show there *isn't* a need for services - and we've been at one of those schools! What we've experienced though wasn't that testing and evals were administered in a way to make it look like services weren't needed, but rather the offer of giving specific types of tests/evals wasn't made unless we requested it, and when the results were presented, they were reported in a way to obscure anything that would show there was a need.
Yes to both.
For DS8, the school psychologist decided not to run the ADOS because my child was chatty and made good eye contact. The private psychologist we got his AS diagnosis from rolled her eyes when she read that.
And his WJIII (at 6y9m) was administered by the school's reading specialist. The report was basically the default computer generated output, including something along the lines of "DS was very cooperative throughout the test and these results are a reliable evaluation of his current achievement". All of his fluency scores were well below grade level, but averaged out to, well, average when combined with the rest. When we had an outside person review them, she noticed he basically got a zero to those subtests. When I cornered the reading specialist she said that oh, he had looked at the page of questions (ranging from below to high above his grade level), then told her he didn't know how to do those (the last ones). And refused to do anything. For all three subtests (reading, writing, math).
"Cooperative", ah! But it basically invalidated all the results and left us with no data to argue with.
Some school districts seem to have a strong incentive not to find problems, especially in bright kids who are not (too) disruptive in class. That doesn't seem to be the case here, so grab the offer. If you don't like the results you can always go private later.
