Amanda, I'm sorry to hear it.
Speaking as someone who's also been hit by that particular truck: you will have to out-persist them, know your rights, and perhaps bring in more help to strengthen your team (so it's not just you holding up your end).
School psychs come in several flavors. Many try to be helpful. We have also encountered the kind who has only a Master's (i.e. not a psych who is licensed to treat people or diagnose them, but qualified only to administer certain educational tests) who nonetheless likes to play the expert and railroad people out of services. Sometimes the district purposefully uses this person as a hit man, sometimes it's on the psych's own initiative. Either way, the school and district see this person as an "expert" and people defer to them, even if they have little actual expertise about what your child needs.
Your best counter to this is to provide better experts, ones who are obviously best suited to speak to the specific needs of your child and who can call them out when they do not follow the law. We bring our outside medical expert and an advocate to every school meeting about DS. This costs us money, but ensures that they can't deny our child's needs. And it costs us much less than going to court for due process would have.
Our first advocate was provided for free by the state's Legal Rights Service, which helps people with disabilities. This got us over the hump to the IEP. The state can't provide free services forever, here it's emergency-basis only, so we had to switch to a private advocate, who has done very well for us. Maybe your state has something like this? If not, look into attorneys for special education in your area. Sometimes just one letter from a lawyer stating what your DD's rights are will scare a district straight, especially if the district has been to due process before, which is expensive for them as well as for you.
It is also very likely free and not that difficult to file a complaint with your state's Department of Education. If you go this route, you should probably send a copy of the complaint to the school board and superintendent. Have they given you the booklet about IDEA that spells out your rights?
And are you documenting everything? Best advice I have gotten about managing this process: buy a large, heavy duty binder. Every communication with the school gets put into the binder, in order of date, along with all relevant testing that demonstrates what your child needs. If they say horrid things to you, write it all down in ink, date it, and put it in the binder. It is all very valuable evidence. (This is not abstract: the binders have saved us on several occasions.) I also found that buying a small digital voice recorder to take to school meetings caused a significant positive change in the behavior of school personnel. You have to ask everyone's permission to record, but I've never had them say no.
What I don't really recommend at this point is that you, yourself, try to become an expert on the law: it's too detailed and may drive you crazy. You do have to know the basic rights that apply to your child so you will know if you are being lied to, but ultimately the school and district people may never listen to you or take you as seriously as they will listen to your outside experts. I spent a horrible, frantic year boning up on law after my DS's rights were violated, and it took a lot of energy away from other important things (nurturing the actual kid, for instance). It solved the problem better to hire help for this. And it took some of the load off me.
Hang in there. You can do this.
Best wishes,
DeeDee
