For context: We live in DC, our child with moderate-needs autism attends DCPS PK4. Our experience has been positive, but our child needs to be in a self-contained classroom due to higher needs (e.g. CES) and have now been waiting for close to 2 years for central office to come evaluate them.

As I understand it, our options are:

1) stay in DCPS, continue to play nice and hope they do the self-contained classroom observation before K and move child to a CES self-contained; which could be our IB but could very possibly involve another school + bussing if our IB school doesn't have seats, which I really don't prefer.

2) stay in DCPS, hire an attorney advocate and fight the delays to get observed for CES or private placement(?) though I don't know where that would be

3) Without getting into too personal details, we're in the position to be able to move and rent somewhere for the next 9-12 months - so we could move to either the FCPS or MCPS districts as long as we stay close enough to the commutable metro area. If we do this, it would need to be a move in January so mid school-year, which may be a bad idea.

If we go with option 3, is there a district we should focus on that would be better suited to educating a child with moderate-needs autism? What would you do in our situation? Like everyone else, we want the best for our child, but also balancing realistic factors and logistics of moving can be overwhelming. We also do ABA after school and private ST/OT, which we want to stay close enough to continue.

We've only lived in DC for a relatively short time so I'm still not familiar with all the ins and outs of the districts, especially when it comes to special education services. I've done a lot of searching on DCUM, as it seems like opinions are all over the place but wanted to reach out for advice here too since this forum would be more knowlegable. Thank you.