Reply to School thinks DS has ASD, dev ped does not agree. Now what?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP again. I suspect the school is pushing the ASD diagnosis in order to get him an IEP. He didn't meet eligibility last year (prior to 504 diagnosis) and still wouldn't based on grades.[/quote]

What county are you in?  Your school is wrong to say that your child can't qualify for a 504 plan "based on grades".  It's simply illegal to say that a child must be "failing" to receive an IEP or 504 plan.  There is no grade benchmark which excludes students from getting an IEP or 504.  But, schools often try to pull this with ADHD (i.e. giving only a 504 plan).  I have a second child who had a medical issue and qualified for a 504 plan for several years even though she had straight As.  I have a child who has been on an IEP since 3rd grade for ADHD and that DS has never had a grade of C in his life.   Your school clearly doesn't understand the law.  This happened to us, and it was especially surprising since it was the school psychologist who was pushing the denial of a plan, and we were lawyers telling the school psychologist she was wrong!  We had to go over the school psychologist's head and complain to the countywide 504 supervisor. (This is an option for you, as all counties must have this position required under the law.)  Most school psychs simply don't have that much experience and also do not have very much legal training at all, yet since they are often seen as the most educated person in the room, they are often deferred to by other staff, including principals and teachers.

To qualify for a 504 plan, you need to show 1) disorder (i.e. "physical or mental impairment) that 2) substantially limits a major life activity such as reading, thinking, concentration, etc.   To qualify for an IEP, you need to show 1) disorder 2) adverse impact on education (this does not have to be bad grades!!!) and 3) need for specialized instruction.

You should return the autism form screening with a note to the psychologist that (cc'd to the school principal and special ed person for your grade or school) and say that you believe that it would be inappropriate for you to fill out just one form on a suspected diagnosis.  Instead, a comprehensive assessment should be done to consider all possible diagnoses, and therefore, you are hereby requesting an IEP screening meeting to determine if there is a "reasonable suspicion" that your child might qualify for an IEP and, if so, to have a full IEP team determine together what that IEP assessment should look like.  (Remember, you are an equal member of the IEP team.)

At that meeting, the school psychologist will try to get you to sign a generic consent to assess form.  This form doesn't usually list the specific individual tests being proposed. It usually just says you consent to educational and psychological assessment.  Do not sign that form until you get more information on which tests are being proposed.  This is a moment when you have leverage to make sure that the testing covers all the things that you think are issues -- not just an ASD or ADHD checklist, but a full speech and language assessment with standardized normed instruments, and other achievement testing, social pragmatic language testing, etc.  In that context, you should indicate that you are willing to fill out the form ASD form the school is asking you to do (because they are also testing for things that are of concern to you).

Of course, if you can afford a private neuropsych and/or a private speech assessment, you can skip a lot of the above.  Instead, once the report is done, you can write the school, ask for an IEP meeting and share the report with the school.  Usually, a school psychologist is so busy that he/she just accepts the report, because otherwise they would have to do all their own testing.

FWIW, my ADHD child has pragmatic language issues; it's very common.  My DS was diagnosed at a very young age with a language disorder (MERLD) that has some language symptom overlap with autism.  Some people mistake all pragmatic language issues as signifying autism.  Others think MERLD is what parents in denial choose to call kids who really have autism.  Neither of these are true.  Fortunately, my child's pragmatic language issues are fairly mild, so we never had to fight this fight, but I know other families with children who had MERLD diagnoses that did.  At the time of the MERLD diagnosis (around age 5), the SPL who did my child's assessment noted "attention issues" and referred us for more neuropsych testing.  By the time DS was old enough for accurate ADHD testing (around age 7), it was becoming clear that attention and executive function issues were the underlying cause of a specific learning disability that affected his language acquisition, and he was subsequently diagnosed with dysgraphia and reading disorder.  [/quote]

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