An Independent Educational Evaluation is an evaluation by a qualified person who is not employed by your school district.   You can request such evaluation if you determine that the evaluation by the district was not performed correctly or was incomplete.   Such evaluations may be requested due to some of the following reasons:

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• Your child is bilingual however, the therapist performing the assessment was monolingual and was not trained in assessing/working with bilingual/multicultural children.

• Your child is an international adopted child (recently or many years’ post adoption) and the therapist assessing the child is unfamiliar with the considerations in working with Internationally Adopted Children.

• Your child presents with social pragmatic language difficulties (or any other complex deficits) however, the assessment he/she received did not target his social language difficulties directly (or at all).

• The district performed an evaluation with a limited amount of information.

• The child did not qualify for intervention services within the school system, due to limited assessment practices (abridged testing), presenting with a number of significant linguistic, critical thinking, and social pragmatic deficits.

• The district performed evaluation was performed using outdated/no longer relevant to the child’s present needs testing instruments.

• The district performed evaluation is significantly outdated yet therapy goals continue to be based on the outdated assessment.

• The child is making limited gains despite years of therapy services and you would like to get a second opinion from a different clinician.

• The children presents with complex constellation of disabilities (e.g., Down Syndrome, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, etc.) however, the evaluation only contains the child’s weaknesses vs. highlighting his/her strengths, therefore, affecting targeted functional therapy service provision