Where to test for dyslexia?

[Anonymous]

My child is in the second grade. I am pretty much sure that he has dyslexia. I tried to test him through the school, but they didn't want to do it (I guess, mainly because of financial side of the question), saying that he just below 1 grade in reading and writing...
Where should I go?
Could you recommend the place to test him, where it would cost less than $2000?

TIA

[Anonymous]

Anyone, please!

[Anonymous]

The problem is, a comprehensive evaluation will probably cost over $2,000. You might someone to do a less thorough job, but then you learn what you already know - that reading is a relative weakness - but not where within reading the weakness lies, or whether there are other issues, or what strengths you can build on, or whether what looks like dyslexia is actually something else.

[Anonymous]

Try going to the Washington Education Resource website and call testers from there:

www.WISERdc.com

[Anonymous]

I understand your pain. We had an incredibly difficult time working with DS's school - even after we shelled out a lot of money on private evaluations. But, because DS wasn't a behavioral problem and he wasn't 1.5 standard deviations below normal, they weren't willing to do anything. We knew that it was only a matter of time before he hit that magic threshold but we weren't willing to allow him to fail and his confidence to continue to nose dive. We hired an education consultant who came highly recommended. She can help guide you in this area as well as represent your interests with the school. She knows how to get your child diagnosed/evaluation, what the schools know, she knows the rules/law, what they can provide, where there's flexibility, what they should be doing and what they could be doing. She is persistent without being oppositional. Best of all, your relationship with the school isn't harmed. She sort of the bad cop while you get to be good cop (except we basically just keep our mouths shut during the IEP meetings and let her talk).

Dr. Ruth Heitin
http://www.educationalconsultingva.com/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I understand your pain. We had an incredibly difficult time working with DS's school - even after we shelled out a lot of money on private evaluations. But, because DS wasn't a behavioral problem and he wasn't 1.5 standard deviations below normal, they weren't willing to do anything. We knew that it was only a matter of time before he hit that magic threshold but we weren't willing to allow him to fail and his confidence to continue to nose dive. We hired an education consultant who came highly recommended. She can help guide you in this area as well as represent your interests with the school. She knows how to get your child diagnosed/evaluation, what the schools know, she knows the rules/law, what they can provide, where there's flexibility, what they should be doing and what they could be doing. She is persistent without being oppositional. Best of all, your relationship with the school isn't harmed. She sort of the bad cop while you get to be good cop (except we basically just keep our mouths shut during the IEP meetings and let her talk).

Dr. Ruth Heitin
http://www.educationalconsultingva.com/

OP here: thank you so uch for your advice!

[Anonymous]

Hi OP-

My son is 6 year old, but has difficulty consistently recognizing and retrieving certain letters, regardless of how many times he's seen them. We are very concerned that he could have dyslexia, too. Since he is so young, we found that people wouldn't test him or define his issue. The issue is that when a young child is struggling, their self-esteem takes such a hit that the confidence issue becomes as big as problem as the learning challenge. We explained to my son that he is very smart and that everyone learns differently and that we had to find the best way that he would learn and give him new strategies.

So, first we ruled out any medical issues with visit to a pediatric opthalmologist to make sure his vision was working (mind you, it entails much more than a vision test.) We also got a hearing test at G'town. Had a visit to an ENT to make sure that there weren't any other issues (he had tonsils/adenoids removed.)

We had a neuro-psych evaluation done w/ Bill Stixrud b/c often times dyslexia is comorbid with attention issues, fine motor issues, etc. Stixrud is considered the best in the area, but there is a six-month waiting period for testing.

In the meantime, we do one-on-one individual therapy at the Lab School to learn strategies for letter memory and retrieval. We will probably have to have a reading specialist for him as he gets older. The Lab school speech/language therapists also do screening for dyslexia/dysgraphia and other reading challenges.

For school next year, we are considering going public w/ an IEP or private.

As I'm sure you know, public schools really don't provide a lot of support for these kind of things and you have to very strongly advocate for your child. I would see what your insurance covers and get some testing so that you can at least get and IEP so that the school will have to start accepting some responsibility. Also, if you need to build a case an IEP is your first step. I've heard that when the district or county do the testing, they don't diagnose as aggressively. If you have private testing, the school systems are required by law to accept those tests.

One last thing, there is a new school--the Sienna School--that is designed for kids w/ dyslexia. It's in Silver Spring now, but will be moving to Kensington, I think. It starts in 4th grade. If you call the school I'm sure they will give you a wealth of resources. Good luck and I'm happy to answer any more questions if you have them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
As I'm sure you know, public schools really don't provide a lot of support for these kind of things and you have to very strongly advocate for your child. I would see what your insurance covers and get some testing so that you can at least get and IEP so that the school will have to start accepting some responsibility. Also, if you need to build a case an IEP is your first step. I've heard that when the district or county do the testing, they don't diagnose as aggressively. If you have private testing, the school systems are required by law to accept those test

My experience is that the schools don't test or evaluate thoroughly. My DS has a significant expressive/receptive speech delay, SPD and likely ADHD. He's been in a county special ed preschool for the past year. Before our annual IEP review, we asked for a speech/ language evaluation so we could add ST as a related service. We'd had extensive testing done, made all the reports available which indicated at least a 2 year expressive/receptive speech delay. We met for the review and found out that nothing had come of our request. We rescheduled the meeting until the school ST could "observe" him. When we got the report of her observation, we saw that she only observed him for "alliteration" and she was not recommending a full evaluation. Turns out the ST didn't know about all the other evaluations we'd provided. I had copies of the reports and she quickly recommended a full eval.

Not having our private reports available shouldn't have made any difference. Non-familiars are lucky if they understand 25% of what he says (his intelligbility should be in the 90% range). I'm his mother and I only understand about 60% of what he says. He inconsistently drops consonants so it's hard to know which word he's trying to say (sometimes cat is '-at' sometimes it's 'ca-'), uses incorrect grammar and requires a lot of modeling and time to speak. The village idiot could tell that something is seriously wrong with his speech.

[Anonymous]

OP here: thank you so much for your responses!