I wish I could say this type of thing never happened to us, but it did. Over and over again - after fighting like crazy to get our ds an IEP, we were still constantly fighting to keep his accommodations while he was in his first elementary school.
I also don't like to fight and don't enjoy confrontation, but my personality can be very stubborn and I'm prone to getting angry and fighting back rather than sitting back and just letting a meeting happen... so I had to work at purposely being calm, letting the school team say whatever they wanted to say, then gently but repeatedly over and over again explain (simply and briefly) that ds needed ______ because he was dysgraphic. These were things that happened to us in meetings, and how I chose to respond:
When the school tried to pull out writing samples that proved that he was on par for grade level, I pulled out a sample of his current schoolwork and samples of his handwriting from home that were representative of his true handwriting ability. I didn't argue grade level, I showed the impact of dysgraphia.
When the school staff insisted that dysgraphia (if it did exist) wasn't impacting ds in the classroom, I showed the split between his WJ-III Achievement Scores - if you plot the subtest scores on the y-axis vs type of subtest on the x-axis, my ds' subtests split into three groups - one high-scoring group which matches his IQ level, one group that is around 30 percentile points lower, and another group that is significantly lower than that. The difference between the groups is in the type of response. The high scores are subtests that have oral responses. The middle scores are subtests that have written responses but are untimed. The low scores are subtests that have written responses and are also timed. That one graph was something the school couldn't argue. (Note: they still tried to not give accommodations, but the graph usually shut down the argument that handwriting didn't impact ds).
When the school showed us a sample of ds' timed handwriting and noted how neat it was and how he had done it along with the rest of the class and that his was not the fastest it also wasn't the slowest, we requested that the school OT tell us what grade level the handwriting speed corresponded to. The OT was resistant at first, claimed there were many different studies with different ranges of words/letters/minute vs grade level, so I gently agreed and said I understood it wasn't something they could give us an absolute answer on, but could she please count the letters per minute anyway. That got us an answer - ds' speed was several grades below his grade level.
When the school staff tried to tell us how he was "neither the best in class or the worst in class" we reminded them that the meeting wasn't about everyone else in class, we were meeting to discuss ds' individual education needs.
When the school staff tried to tell us ds needed to request his accommodations (this is really a hot button for me - I'll explain more below), we just said no, he needs the accommodations, give him the accommodations. If they argued that he needed to learn to advocate for himself, we countered "teach him to advocate for himself in an area that isn't impacted by his disability". If they argued that he needed to remind them of his accommodations we gently reminded him that he didn't, it was the school's responsibility to accommodate the disability, not ds' responsibility to remind the school of their responsibility.
When the school staff tried to tell us ds' refusal to write or inability to produce more writing was possibly due to 1800 other reasons *other* than dysgraphia we responded (based on the situation) with either "well then, will the school evaulate ds for ___", or "even if those possibilities are occurring, that doesn't doesn't take away ds' dysgraphia".
It's good you've followed up with an email - we found that writing emails after meetings where we restated what we heard the school staff say, followed by our question re why that wasn't valid etc, was very helpful in making a lot of the school staff's comments from meetings disappear into thin air - they didn't want any of what they'd said actually in writing anywhere.
Having a diagnosis and report from a private neuropsych will also help. When school staff tried to tell us there was nothing wrong with ds' ability to use handwriting (or whatever was in the neuropsych's report) I replied "So you are disagreeing with an experienced respected pediatric neuropsychologist's diagnosis?"
Soooo... the replies that I listed above didn't necessarily get us everything we were requesting in ds' IEP but they did absolutely shut down the script the school staff was using to argue that ds didn't need accommodations and services. And I do believe the meetings and arguments on the part of the school were carefully scripted. Prior to moving into the IEP eligibility process, ds had a teacher who clearly cared about him and was obviously very concerned about his performance on writing tasks. Once ds was "in the pipeline" for eligibility and we were having team meetings, his teacher morphed into a person who was telling us how wonderfully ds was doing, how his handwriting was not a problem etc.
Re your school psych not being able to put dysgraphia on her report - I would worry about that for now. Focus on getting the private diagnosis (and even that might not say "dysgraphia" - our ds' diagnosis from his neuropsych report is "Developmental Coordination Disorder" - but the neuropsych included a paragraph in her report specifically addressing ds' inability to use handwriting to communicate his knowledge). If you don't have them, be sure to request the full set of subtest scores from his school psych's WJ-III testing - because even though the school psych hasn't written a diagnostic report for you, there are most likely obvious clues that *you* can use to point to in future meetings to show the impact of his dysgraphia. You could try creating a chart from the achievement scores like I mentioned above, and you can also look for large discrepancies in subtest scores on the cognitive abilities subtests and if there are low scores in any area, relate those back to the skill being tested and does it tie into your ds' areas of challenge.
I also mentioned above how mad and frustrated I get at the words "student will request accommodation" - our school tried again and again to make our ds do this, and it just wasn't going to happen. It wasn't even worded this way in his actual IEP, but we were told over and over again at meetings that ds wasn't given an accommodation for (whatever) because he didn't ask for it, and he needed to ask for it. Now that ds is older, he is able to tell us that he was simply too young, too confused, and too intimidated by adults when he was in early elementary to ask for accommodations. He also didn't really want his accommodations at that point because they made him look and feel different from the other students. So it was just a horrible situation.
Hmmm... I suspect it's kinda obvious from the long length of my reply that I haven't fully recovered from ds' elementary school experience yet. My cynical note (and I sincerely hope this isn't going to be the case for you and your ds) is that - all those well-thought-out replies I came up with did help us advocate successfully for a *written* document, but they didn't ultimately result in our ds getting what he needed in the classroom, and we ultimately left the school where we were having to do so much extended and continuous advocating. I didn't realize until we left that other schools weren't so adversarial.
Let us know what response you get from your emails - and hang in there!
polarbear
ps - in the thick of things like this at school, it also always helped me to remember that what our ds needed, he needed for life, not just for school.
