Was your local psychologist a neuropsychologist evaluation or testing for gifted only? Were tests included in addition to ability and achievement testing? I think it must have been a more global eval based on your other post with diagnoses.
We considered having our 2e ds evaluated by either GDC or another professional with experience with gifted children after his initial diagnosis by a neuropsych, and we did talk to the GDC staff via email about our ds, but ultimately decided not to pursue an evaluation that far away from home. After thinking through everything, we didn't feel that it would add any signficant knowledge that we didn't already have, and wasn't worth the $... but that was just for our one specific child. I also felt that it was easy to predict some of what the GDC would say based on material available online and in the book that LS wrote.
You mention your local psychologist gave only generic recommendations - have you tried to put the recommendations in place and how did it work out? We also have a relatively "short" report from our neuropsych eval compared to what I've read others have on this forum, and the recommendations are fairly generic for the challenges our ds has... but otoh... they were great recommendations and were quite likely what any other psych would have recommended.
We also found that investing our eval $ locally was helpful in that our psychologists had knowledge of our local schools - while a psychologist elsewhere might be able to give general recommendations about the type of learning environment that might be best for a specific child, they don't have local knowledge such as how individual schools actually function (vs how they are advertised) or attitude of staff to accommodations etc. We also found that our school district personnel were much more willing to accept recommendations by local psychologists than they would have been willing to accept a diagnosis from out-of-state that had the appearance we'd "shopped" for it.
Hope that doesn't sound discouraging - it's not meant to be!
Best wishes,
polarbear
ps - we would have considered one of the pyschs on the Hoagies list, but there weren't any listed in our area.
