outside evaluation not honored by school

Momtwoboys,

I wish to respond to your recent post. From the information you provded, please note the following:

1) A parent may submit and provide an independent evaluation to school personnel and I presume in this instance to the IP Team.

2) All independent evaluations provided by parents are required to be accepted, reviewed, and considered. The local school division does not have the luxury to say it will not be considered or refuse to do so.

3) If the local school division in fact refuses to accept, review, or consider the avaluation information, they must provide you with Prior Written Notice (PWN) within ten (10) business days of the refusal. This is within the regulatory standard. This is also one of your procedural safeguard rights.

4) Finally, a local school division does not have to accept the recommendations made from the independent evaluation. As stated before, they are only required to accept, review, and consider the report.

5) As a parent, you always have a right to disagree with the local school division and request a mediation conference, file a formal complaint with the State Education Agency, or a formal due process hearing. My advice is to attempt to address your concerns with the Director/Supervisor of Special Education first and if not successful, then proceed to exercise your procedural safeguard rights.

DRHD

From my experience it is in fact very common for schools to simply reject outside testing because they don't want to accept it. You need to write a letter stating the disgnosis and ask that it be placed in your child's cumulative file. You can remove it later if you want, even years down the road. Then you need to research your schools testing criteria. Every school has testing criteria for the people that administer the tests. Each school division has lists of local testers that they use outside of the school system. If the school system tests him and you disagree with it you then request an outside independent evaluation. They might or might not have to pay for it. If they do not want to pay for it, the school has to file a due process hearing and they have the burden of proving that their testing was good enough. You can work on finding an argument for why it was not good enough if it comes to that point later. You can then choose whichever tester from that list that you want. They have to accept those results then. Second, you can research how an educational person tests for that ability and compare it to how a medical person tests for it. Third, compare the medical person's credentials to the credentials of the other testers from the schools.

I have a daughter who is 6 and dyslexic. The school does not want to accept our outside testing either. Same battle. It is inherited. My husband is dyslexic. His brother is dyslexic. Our son is not dyslexic at all and neither am I. The school tried to say it was not proper, they were not true evaluations, etc. Fighting the good battle right now.