What do you do as teachers if you have a student who has been misdiagnosed with an LD, or what do you do if s/he has been diagnosed and you believe it is a misdiagnosis (being diagnosed with the wrong LD or maybe the child never had any LD)?
Re: misdiagnosis
I have this happen a lot. Sometimes the placement committee wants to provide some extra help, but the student doesn’t qualify. I haven’t discovered a solution yet, however, with the reduction in funding for education in my state we might begin to follow the guidelines of the law. Believe it or not, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (15 years ago) we didn’t put ADHD kids on IEPs. Remediation was the focus and most of these kids didn’t need remediation. Now every ADD/ADHD kid gets an IEP and for the most part it is useless. Especially the students who don’t have a program in place at home that has structure which would match the school and the child is not medicated. I’m not sure when the placement of ADHD/ADD started sneaking into the sped classrooms but I’m not sure it’s is the most appropriate placement.
Re: misdiagnosis
Why do you think that the student has been misdiagnosed? Is learning disabled his classification… does he have a medical diagnosis?
Re: misdiagnosis
Actually I am doing a research question on what do parents do if they have a child that has been misdiagnosed with a LD, or how they feel about misdiagnosis. Do you have anything you can add to help me with this question?
Re: misdiagnosis
Parents who disagree with a school diagnosis can request an independent evaluation. Personally, I’d by-pass the school paid IEE and chose my own evaluator. That way you have control over whether to release the results or not. Most schools do not do indepth testing anyway, so if there is a question about a child’s problems, it’s not a bad idea to get further testing anyway.
Janis
There is only one thing that can be done and that is to request an updated evaluation. The parent and IEP team would need to agree to the reevaluation.
Janis