Quantum, as the parent of a child with fine motor dysgraphia, there is a lot that is familiar in your post, including things such as reversals getting better with time but always that nagging feeling like the fine motor skills just don't seem quite on track. The inability to master left vs right is a huge red flag for me, and I would want further evaluations. I can make some suggestions re what to do re advocating for the evaluations at school... but my personal recommendation would be to first seek out a private neuropsych evaluation. Some of us here have been able to have our medical insurance cover the eval, so if you'd be willing to consider it, I'd start by asking your ped for a recommendation, see if it's something you can afford or is covered by insurance and if it is doable - DO IT. It will be so much easier and give you (most likely) more thorough answers and recommendations for the path-forward moreso than you will get through a school eval.
A few quick notes re school - first, the school OT can't independently decide your ds doesn't qualify for an IEP eligibility review (ie, testing) - the "team" that is made up of teachers, parents, SPED staff person etc has to make the decision together, so you should have a voice in the process. That said, you'd most likely have a stronger voice if you also have a private diagnosis. It definitely helped us when our ds' "team" (the school staff part of it) tried their best to argue nothing was an issue, because we could politely and calmly just refer them back to hard data.
We were also told numerous times at school meetings that our ds' handwriting speed was "average". If the school is telling you something about your ds' handwriting speed, be sure to ask them to quantify it (give you a letters/minute or words/minute number) and also to rank it compared to peers (is it faster/slower than his grade level peers) - there are quite a few studies that you can find online (and that his OT should be able to access) that will give expected handwriting speed ranges by grade level. When our school tried to tell us our ds' handwriting speed was "average" we asked them to do this, and we found out it he was actually writing at a rate several years below his grade level.
FWIW, our ds has keyboarding/etc accommodations in place and relies on AT to write in almost all of his work at school at this point... but the area that our ds is most impacted in at this point is math, and I'm not surprised that's where a teacher is first pointing out an issue. It takes our ds a *long* time to write out his math problems, and he spends approximately 2-3 times as long on math homework than his peers do or his teacher expects homework to take because of that. There are tech solutions that can absolutely help with this - our ds doesn't choose to use them at this point (with a few exceptions)... but it's very clear that our ds is very *good* at quickly picking up on math concepts, yet it takes him a horrendously long time to write out math problems due to his dysgraphia. One thing you could do while you wait for an evaluation for your ds is to ask his pre-algebra teacher for informal accommodations. Examples of accommodations for math include: reduced # of problems worked (every other problem or one problem for of each type of concept etc) (which works great for high ability kids who usually don't need repetition to grasp a concept), extended time on tests, extended homework deadline, and use of AT that you provide (laptop or iPad with software that is math-specific). We've found with our ds that sometimes even though the school as a whole is arguing against accommodations etc, an individual teacher who cares and recognizes the challenge, will be willing to let a child have informal accommodations - and these can be quite helpful later on as you're advocating for official accommodations, because they give you a record of how the accommodations can be implemented easily and successfully as well as a record of how well they work.
Best wishes,
polarbear
