request sped eval for 7 year old with reading difficulties?

[Anonymous]

Would you go ahead and request a special education evaluation for a 7-year-old with the following:

- Early speech delay, ear infections, ADHD diagnosis, family history of ADHD/ASD, family history of dysgraphia & Specific Learning Disabilities
-Early intervention speech/OT, private SLP until age 6, targeted reading plan in 1st grade (due to VALLSS high-risk results).
-child found ADHD medication that works January 2025 and teacher has reported good effort (he previously would not even try challenging tasks)
-Fall VALLSS (1st grade, 2024) score was a 592 and Fall VALLSS (2nd grade,2025) was a 624. They've made almost no progress over the year with decoding. Real word decoding fall last year was 3/15 and this year 2/15. pseudoword decoding last year 1/15 and this year 0/15. Phoneme segmenting last year 5/10 and this year 3/10. They made a little progress with encoding from 11/80 last year to 39/88 this year but are still super behind. Fluency is also poor.

The school has simply sent home another reading plan intervention, and he will participate in a reading intervention with 12 other students for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week. They have provided individual plans, but it's not clear how it will be individualized with so many other students in one group.

I feel like we have plenty of data to support that he is struggling and we need to do a full evaluation to see if his ADHD is impacting him or something else, like a specific learning disability. I honestly am frustrated that his school did not push for any further supports or interventions at this point. I think this seems more than reasonable, but am I off-base here??

[Anonymous]

You need to officially request an evaluation for a possible learning disability and include the information you have posted here. Send this to the principal, teacher, and guidance counselor. If they have a meeting and decline to proceed to evaluation, ask to whom you appeal that decision, and then do so. For some kids, interventions can do the trick, but this child appears to have a lot of red flags in their profile and waiting is not likely to help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:-Fall VALLSS (1st grade, 2024) score was a 592 and Fall VALLSS (2nd grade,2025) was a 624. They've made almost no progress over the year with decoding. Real word decoding fall last year was 3/15 and this year 2/15. pseudoword decoding last year 1/15 and this year 0/15. Phoneme segmenting last year 5/10 and this year 3/10. They made a little progress with encoding from 11/80 last year to 39/88 this year but are still super behind. Fluency is also poor.

OP all of what you wrote here indicates that there is probably more going on than ADHD, and you should request an evaluation for dyslexia. Many schools are proactive with Tier 2 (small group) interventions, but for testing that would lead to Tier 3 (intensive) interventions, they wait for the parent to initiate. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about why. The system is broken.

Just ask for a screening (initial evaluation) meeting. It's step one in the IEP process. At the meeting, the team would decide whether the evidence indicates that testing should be done. Once you send the email, the school must hold the meeting within 30 days. If they determine testing should be done, they have another 60 days to schedule and conduct the testing. This International Dyslexia Association info sheet on testing and evaluation might be helpful. https://dyslexiaida.org/testing-and-evaluation/

[Anonymous]

Yes, ask for a screening. I agree, 12 kids is too many... three to five might work.

Also, try having your kid work with decodable picture books at home.

[Anonymous]

Why wouldn’t you? What’s holding you back?

But yes, a screening seems reasonable.

[Anonymous]

I agree with others that it seems worth it to move ahead with an evaluation, but also be prepared that they don't have the resources to actually get your child where they need to be with reading. You need to hire a 1:1 tutor who works with dyslexic kids (Orton Gillingham or similar).

[Anonymous]

Also get your child evaluated independent of the school. It looks like you already have experience with those processes. School only looks at school. A global evaluation will look at all aspects and can give you recommendations to take to the school. Sometimes that's how you can get services and accomodations if you don't totally agree with the school based testing results.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree with others that it seems worth it to move ahead with an evaluation, but also be prepared that they don't have the resources to actually get your child where they need to be with reading. You need to hire a 1:1 tutor who works with dyslexic kids (Orton Gillingham or similar).

This. Schedule an eval but find an OG or Wilson tutor for your child. It's expensive and it is a long term fix, not a short term one (think 1-2 years of twice a week at $75-125 an hour). But it's likely your school cannot or does not offer this specialized tutoring. So start with the tutoring as soon as you can.

[Anonymous]

OP here - thanks for the feedback. I did request a meeting (our version of child study) to request an eval before I posted this. I was just trying to check my biases with my child. I actually work for the school division at central office and with older students, which gives me a lot of privilege in accessing support for my children, but also is uncomfortable and results in a lot of blurred boundaries. We've been implementing an MTSS perspective/system division-wide. I've been doing my best to follow the data and the tiered approach in supporting my children, but

I am honestly upset that his school team did not escalate his interventions and instead left it up to me to bring him to a meeting. We had his meeting and will complete a full initial evaluation to explore (Specific Learning Disability) and Other Health Impairment (ADHD), though it seems more likely it is SLD impacting him the most.

The meeting was totally fine, but I learned that my child's reading plan has basically the same exact goals on it from last year and his map scores are all over the place & some of his results decreased from last year. His school was literally just going to keep doing the SAME plan as last year, despite having all this data. I will always advocate for my children and I know generally how to navigate the system, but there are so many parents who do not know how to do that...it is not easy and it feels awful sitting on the parent side hearing how much your child is struggling.

I suspect this is an issue adapting to MTSS and our new tiered system approach, resulting in major gaps, along with Tier 1 instruction issues but I am going to escalate this with central office to work on addressing these gaps to support all of our kids. There's a major issue when you repeatedly hear that tons of division staff are having to hire reading tutors for their OWN children who attend this elementary school, and that basically nothing would have been done to support my child if I had not requested an eval.

I've also hired a private reading tutor, but this is going to be a huge drain on my family resources and families should not have to do that.

[Anonymous]

I have a child (now about to graduate college) who had the same profile (including ear infections and significant family history) -- the early ear infections and speech delays are a significant piece of the puzzle. That, together with the ADHD, caused my kid to have language processing issues that made learning to read very hard, even though he technically wasn't dyslexic.

Make sure that hearing is 100% now & you might also want to ask for auditory processing disorder testing. Even though my kid's hearing tested fine, he has a very hard time discriminating against background noise and sorting out multi-speaker conversations (which is basically the background environment in school all the time).

FWIW, we were in MCPS and had to pull him in 3rd grade and put him in a school that offered explicit dyslexia appropriate instruction in reading. He did learn to decode, but it would have been better if I'd gotten a dyslexia reading tutor in 2nd grade instead of 4th grade.

You are right that families shouldn't have to do it, but part of the problem, IMO, is, frankly, that schools do not actually teach reading with an evidence-based instruction. And most of the "support" is just the same (crappy) reading instruction but with more attention and someone nudging the student to give the correct answers, and when the student can't, they are written off as "stupid".

I'm a tutor, and every year I come across a high school student with undiagnosed dyslexia.

FWIW, I would definitely ask for an independent educational evaluation after the school provided child study. I also regularly encounter parents whose testing has been poorly done or where the tests actually show a problem but the narrative says there is no problem. You need an IEE, especially if you are experiencing "blurred boundaries" between your school role and your kid's needs. You don't want to have to criticize the school study, you want an outside professional whose testing you can point to in support of your position.

Also, you mention ADHD medication. That is not something you need to share with the committee, and the presence or absence of ADHD medication is not a consideration. The law says that students must be evaluated and considered as if in their "unmitigated" state, i.e. how would they be performing if they weren't on meds for ADHD.

I can tell you that, while meds help, they are not a magic bullet that will enable your kid to read. He likely needs very specific instruction that your school is not qualified to give (because very few public schools have dyslexic-appropriate instruction and even if they do they frequently don't provide it with the intensity needed.)

[Anonymous]

As a former teacher, I have some behind-the-scenes insights about testing and interventions (not as much as you do!), and I saw how it played out with my son (diagnosed ADHD & dyslexia in 3rd grade; now in 6th at a school for kids with dyslexia.) One thing you might prepare for -- and maybe you already know this -- is that schools have strict definitions of which test results do and don't result in IEPs and intervention. Our kid could read at grade level in 3rd grade because he listens to a zillion audiobooks and was good at guessing the words he missed. The school didn't care that he couldn't sound out nonsense words because he hadn't absorbed any phonics rules, or that he has major trouble expressing anything about his reading. They just looked at the reading scores and said, He's fine; he can continue to have a 504 for his ADHD. Thankfully, we have family resources to support his going to a school for kids with dyslexia, but I continue to be outraged, and think I should do more for, kids whose neuropsych profiles don't give them what they need.

[Anonymous]

I’d go ahead and sign him up for private OG tutoring. Push for the school to do more as others suggested but also get him OG tutoring.

[Anonymous]

^^ I agree. Even if it's expensive, as you probably know, 7 is a good age to start this.

[Anonymous]

Also--you can write that expenses off on your taxes as a medical expense, so it's not solely a drain.

[Anonymous]

OP here - thanks for the additional feedback. We don't have a school focused on teaching kids with Dyslexia, and while there are tutors....there are not that many that are readily accessible. There is only one private school that I would ever consider for my children, and I'm not sure it would even provide a better educational outcome, honestly.

I have asked my child's tutor to see if they would be open to creating mini lesson plans (10-15 minutes) at home that are easy for me to do with my child. I will pay them, of course, for their work. I know it needs to be provided in small chunks, every day.

My child was motivated to do a lot of practice yesterday, and they worked SO hard!! They worked on reading this decodable UFLI passage (which they had previously read in school and partially read with their tutor as well). This is the passage - https://ufli.education.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/44_Decodable_UFLIFoundations.pdf It took him about 10 minutes to read it and had to sound out everything.

I have some ideas if his tutor isn't able to do lesson plans, but we are going to keep chipping away at it.