DD has ADHD and I kept asking teachers about it before she was diagnosed and they wouldn't give me enough information to even know what direction to turn, which was equally annoying. They talk about "focus issues" but I had no idea if they meant focus issues to the extent that it might be ADHD or just mild focus issues that any 5-6 year old kid might have in certain circumstances. Since they didn't seem overly concerned, for a while I figured DD must be fine, otherwise the teachers would be talking about it more. After all, they would tell a parent if they had a serious concern, right? Wrong! It would have been really helpful if they had said "I don't know if it's ADHD and we can't diagnose that, but I see some focus issues that are different than most of the other kids and you could talk to the doctor and ask about X inventory, and the school psych could come in and do an observation..." etc. etc. Instead they just beat around the bush, even when I asked directly about it and expressed my own concerns. What they should have done was offer to do an evaluation the second I mentioned I have concerns, and told me their own concerns (without offering a diagnosis), told me where to have an outside eval to get a medical diagnosis, and told us that we have a right to an eval (to the extent they can do)...but the district has no idea what the "child find" mandate is and they hardly ever evaluate kids, given the fact that they don't even know what the spec. ed categories are, so that never would have happened.
So given what I went through with DD and no one communicating with me, I was really surprised that a teacher would mention "Aspergers" in relation to DS before even getting to know him. So it goes both ways and there should be a middle ground. Teachers should tell parents that they have concerns and be direct about what they are seeing, but also say that they are not experts and that there is no way to know what is going on until a thorough evaluation by a trained professional is done.
