Just sending more sympathy. Yes, I think we're looking for a needle in a haystack.
We think we have that needle at the moment; DS5 started K a couple weeks ago. SPD, speech, fine motor issues, among other things. His strength is math (except that even there his fine motor issues have held him back - he can barely write numbers). He's in the same montessori classroom where he spent the past two years, and his teacher, thank goodness, is wildly open to handling both his special needs and his strengths. But she's very young - this is her second full year with her own classroom (she started about halfway through DS5's first year of preschool when the other teacher went on maternity leave). In that respect, it has been total luck - that teacher who went on maternity leave had no clue about DS5. DS5's twin brother has an equally excellent veteran teacher, but he doesn't have the special issues that his brother has, and I'm not sure that she would have been as good in that situation. The other great thing is that it is a public charter school, so DS5 has an IEP for speech and fine motor *and* the special ed/learning coordinator (or something like that) called me this morning to firm up a time at the beginning of the school day for her turn to do services - at the outset she'll be working on sound-symbol association/phenome stuff (I guess that takes care of the phonics angle but his teacher wants to spend significant time learning sight words too). Not only will this be great for him, this one on one time, but it will free up his teacher. The county provides these services and he's getting much more time from them than I had anticipated. Add in that it's about a 5 minute drive away, and we have a clear winner. For the time being. I'm trying to stay vigilant on the match between the school and each of my three kids who are at this school.
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out. This stuff about showing the mastery first drives me crazy. In your situation in particular, it's a shame they couldn't take your word for it.
Maybe you could have his old teacher put in a call to the new teacher? Maybe she'd take it from the teacher? Surely she has her old notes as to which works he had "mastered"?
It's also too bad the classroom is so loud. My kids' classrooms are rather quiet, but even so occasionally it gets too noisy for DS5, and the teacher keeps a desk just outside the door for anyone, like DS5, to go to when they want more quiet for their work.
