geofizz, those are great questions - and we aren't dealing with similar challenge so I don't have any answers for you, but one idea I have is do you have a local chapter of the national dyslexia association (I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the group). One of our ds' spelling tutors years ago was affiliated with the group, and I think they have chapters in every state; our local group is made up of parents and professionals. It's possible you could ask through a contact from that group what their experience has been.
Re what the neuropscych testing in a few years, although we aren't dealing with a reading challenge, I can tell you what repeated neuropscyh testing looked like for our ds12 with the severe written expression challenge. He had a diagnosis of Disorder of Written Expression from his first neuropscyh eval in 2nd grade, based primarily on discrepancy between the results of ability and achievement testing (typical WISC vs WJ-III achievement). When he was retested in 5th grade, he'd been working with an SLP for almost a full year on written expression, and he still could not independently write a paragraph without tons of support and prompting. His scores on the very narrow WJ-III subtest for writing that was key in the original diagnosis, however, went from way low to very high thanks to that full year of SLP work because it was part of the very basic first step toward writing remediation. Thanks to that one subtest improvement he lost his DOWE from the neuropsych. We had other test from the same time frame as well as a ton of classroom and home documentation that he clearly couldn't write, but we no longer have a piece of paper from a neuropsych indicating it's a problem (he still has his dysgraphia diagnosis from the neuropsych). Why am I mentioning any of that? Just that it's all quirky and a challenge staying on top of what is an issue vs what is a diagnosis and advocating through it all, so you have my empathy!
Best wishes,
polarbear
